BR  125  . H68  1923 

Hough,  Lynn  Harold,  1877- 

Synthetic  Christianity 


OTHER  BOOKS  BY  DOCTOR  HOUGH 

THE  EYES  OF  FAITH 

THE  MAN  OF  POWER 

IN  THE  VALLEY  OF  DECISION 

THE  MEN  OF  THE  GOSPELS 

THE  LURE  OF  BOOKS 

ATHANASIUS:  THE  HERO 

THE  THEOLOGY  OF  A  PREACHER 

THE  QUEST  FOR  WONDER,  AND  OTHER  PHIL¬ 
OSOPHICAL  AND  THEOLOGICAL  STUDIES 

THE  LITTLE  OLD  LADY 
THE  CLEAN  SWORD 

THE  SIGNIFICANCE  OF  THE  PROTESTANT 
REFORMATION 
FLYING  OVER  LONDON 
THE  OPINIONS  OF  JOHN  CLEARFIELD 
A  LITTLE  BOOK  OF  SERMONS 
THE  INEVITABLE  BOOK 
TWELVE  MERRY  FISHERMEN 


©lie  iHerricfe  lectures,  ©elibeteb  at  ti)t 
(Wo  ^esflepan  (Hnibcitfitp  ittap  6 -10,  1923 


FEB  22  19 


SYNTHETIC 


CHRISTIANITY 


By  ✓ 

LYNN  HAROLD  HOUGH 


THE  ABINGDON  PRESS 


NEW  YORK 


CINCINNATI 


Copyright,  1923,  by 

LYNN  HAROLD  HOUGH 


All  rights  reserved,  including  that  of  translation  into 
foreign  languages,  including  the  Scandinavian 


Printed  in  the  United  States  of  America 


TO  MY  FRIEND 
ALONZO  CORNELL  MONAGLE 


Digitized  by  the  Internet  Archive 
in  2019  with  funding  from 
Princeton  Theological  Seminary  Library 


https://archive.org/details/syntheticchristiOOhoug 


CONTENTS 


PAGE 


Foreword .  9 

Triumphant  Truth .  11 

Triumphant  Goodness .  50 

Triumphant  Beauty .  89 

Triumphant  Brotherhood .  128 

Triumphant  Godliness .  168 


FOREWORD 


The  Merrick  lectures  at  the  Ohio  Wesleyan 
University  have  been  delivered  by  such  men 
as  Doctors  James  McCosh,  James  Stalker,  Sir 
George  Adam  Smith,  George  Jackson,  Walter 
Rauschenbusch,  John  Kelman,  Charles  E. 
Jefferson,  Bishop  Francis  J.  McConnell,  G.  A. 
Johnston  Ross,  and  Henry  Sloan  Coffin.  The 
man  who  is  invited  to  follow  in  such  a  suc¬ 
cession  feels  highly  honored.  He  also  feels  a 
sense  of  very  profound  responsibility.  It  is 
inevitable  that  he  shall  bring  to  the  lecture¬ 
ship  the  most  serious  and  thorough  work  of 
which  he  is  capable.  Personally,  I  would  like 
to  express  my  hearty  appreciation  to  Presi¬ 
dent  John  W.  Hoffman  and  to  Professor 
Rollin  H.  Walker,  the  chairman  of  the  Com¬ 
mittee  on  the  Lectureship,  and  also  to  all  those 
who  listened  to  the  lectures  with  such  gra¬ 
cious  friendliness  and  such  evident  mental 
sympathy. 


Lynn  Harold  Hough. 


\ 


LECTURE  I 


TRIUMPHANT  TRUTH 

A  little  while  ago  Professor  James  Har¬ 
vey  Robinson  published  a  startling,  vivid,  and 
scintillating  book  entitled  The  Mind  in  the 
Making .  It  would  be  hard  to  imagine  a  book 
better  fitted  to  rouse  the  sluggish  mind  or  to 
awaken  the  slumbering  perception.  A  great 
mass  of  erudition  is  used  by  a  mind  of  singu¬ 
lar  agility,  and  if  the  result  is  somewhat 
topsy-turvy,  it  is  undeniably  productive  of 
amazing  stimulus.  As  an  intellectual  shower 
bath  one  could  scarcely  prescribe  a  better 
book.  But  as  one  thinks  it  all  over  it  is  easy 
to  perceive  that  Professor  Robinson’s  think¬ 
ing  is  much  stronger  on  its  destructive  than 
on  its  constructive  side.  With  huge  gusto  he 
sets  about  clearing  away  the  rubbish,  but 
he  does  not  seem  to  be  very  clear  as  to 
what  will  be  left  when  the  rubbish  has  all 
been  destroyed.  Whatever  else  he  is,  one 
would  never  think  of  calling  him  a  synthetic 
thinker. 


11 


12  SYNTHETIC  CHRISTIANITY 


A  good  many  very  able  men  who  are  at  work 
just  now  seem  to  share  more  or  less  this  char¬ 
acteristic  of  the  author  of  The  Mind  in  the 
Making y  different  as  they  may  be  from  him  in 
many  ways.  When  you  read  such  a  brilliant 
volume  as  Professor  George  Santayana’s 
Character  and  Opinion  in  the  United  States , 
you  find  plenty  of  searching  criticism  and  no 
end  of  skillful  writing,  but  when  you  seek  a 
view  of  life  which  shall  rest  upon  certain 
clearly  defined  and  productive  principles  you 
meet  with  disappointment.  There  is  a  good 
deal  of  urbane  and  distinguished  disillusion¬ 
ment  back  of  all  the  penetrating  insight  and 
under  all  the  cogent  analysis.  The  typical 
writing  of  our  time  frequently,  perhaps  usu¬ 
ally,  is  quite  devoid  of  the  synthetic  passion. 
Such  a  volume  as  Amy  Lowell’s  Tendencies  in 
Modern  American  Poetry  reveals  many  a  fine 
artistic  impulse  at  work  among  our  keen  and 
enthusiastic  innovators.  There  are  many  no¬ 
table  qualities.  There  is  a  robust  honesty. 
There  is  a  hatred  of  that  cloyingly  sweet  sen¬ 
timent  which  expresses  the  emotions  in  proc¬ 
ess  of  decay.  There  is  a  great  delight  in  the 
sharp  and  gritty  word  and  in  the  clear  and 
swift-cutting  phrase.  There  is  an  enthusiastic 
sense  of  emancipation  from  many  a  form  of 
mental  and  sesthetic  slavery.  But  what  strikes 


TRIUMPHANT  TRUTH 


13 


one  as  most  significant  is  this :  there  is  a  com¬ 
plete  absence  of  propelling  constructive  en¬ 
thusiasm.  There  is  no  sense  of  life  as  a  noble 
structure  which  must  be  seen  in  its  complete¬ 
ness  and  set  forth  as  a  glorious  unity.  Indeed, 
you  have  an  uneasy  suspicion  that  these  writ¬ 
ers  are  busy  with  the  exquisite  working  over 
of  fragments  just  because  they  do  not  believe 
that  life  offers  anything  more  than  bits  of 
tissue  which  never  combine  into  a  great  organ¬ 
ism.  There  is  no  faith  that  life  is  organic. 
There  is  no  profound  and  creative  belief  that 
all  of  experience  fits  together  into  a  mighty 
meaning  the  searching  for  which  is  the  poet’s 
and  the  philosopher’s  meat  and  drink. 

All  this  is  in  striking  contrast  to  the  mood 
which  saturated  the  life  out  of  which  the 
greatest  achievements  of  the  period  behind  us 
came.  Herbert  Spencer’s  Synthetic  Philoso¬ 
phy  may  have  had  faults  and  limitations 
enough,  but  through  it  all  moved  one  tremen¬ 
dous  belief.  It  was  possible,  the  author  of 
the  Synthetic  Philosophy  believed,  to  think 
together  the  vast  and  varied  experiences  of 
men  and  to  give  them  scientific  standing  in  a 
coherent  view  of  existence  and  life.  There 
were  ultimate  mysteries  which  Spencer  never 
placed  in  this  articulate  scheme  of  things. 
But  the  synthetic  passion  commanded  his 


14  SYNTHETIC  CHRISTIANITY 


deepest  and  most  characteristic  activities.  In 
America  a  thinker  like  Josiah  Royce,  while 
conscious  of  the  difficulties  and  the  problems 
presented  by  the  new  knowledge  and  the 
uninterpreted  relationships  of  many  of  the 
new  sciences,  was  all  the  while  driven  by  a 
consuming  belief  that  it  is  possible  to  think  of 
life  in  such  a  way  as  to  put  great  moral  and 
spiritual  forces  in  command  of  all  of  our 
thinking  and  all  of  our  activity.  The  Philoso¬ 
phy  of  Loyalty  represented  the  eagerness  of  an 
ethically  synthetic  mind  moving  among  the 
confusing  and  sometimes  not  entirely  digested 
materials  of  an  age  of  transition.  A  certain 
creative  quality  which  characterized  the  best 
writing  of  a  period  out  of  which  wTe  have 
passed  is  seen  very  characteristically  in  the 
writing  of  Robert  Browning.  He  saw  every 
gargoyle  on  the  cathedral  of  life.  But,  after 
all,  he  did  believe  that  there  was  a  cathedral. 
And  he  believed  that  it  was  a  consummate 
piece  of  exquisite  building.  He  had  the  syn¬ 
thetic  mind.  But  he  had  more.  He  had  a 
sort  of  glorious  synthetic  enthusiasm.  He 
believed  in  life  so  tremendously  that  every 
sight  of  the  ugly  and  the  evil  ( and  no  man  was 
more  honest  than  he)  led  him  on  to  a  beauty 
which  transcended  the  ugliness  and  a  good 
which  mastered  the  evil. 


TRIUMPHANT  TRUTH 


15 


It  is  very  easy  to  see  that  the  notable  thing 
about  all  this  was  just  that  it  released  a  con¬ 
stant  stream  of  creative  energy.  The  syn¬ 
thetic  passion  is  always  making  builders.  It 
produces  great  thinkers  and  great  workers 
and  great  artists  and  men  and  women  who 
live  great  lives  under  the  inspiration  of  mighty 
enthusiasms.  It  is  very  clear,  too,  when  we 
stop  to  do  a  little  close  thinking,  that  our 
own  time  must  find  a  capacity  for  creative 
enthusiasm  if  the  vitality  of  the  world  and  of 
civilization  itself  is  not  to  suffer  depletion. 
We  must  find  the  secret  of  the  synthetic  mind 
in  the  terms  of  our  own  experience  of  life. 
We  cannot  take  over  without  critical  exam¬ 
ination  the  features  of  even  noble  views  of 
the  past  which  attempted  to  give  life  com¬ 
pleteness.  But  with  the  instruments  of  our 
own  minds  and  with  the  materials  life  gives 
us,  we  must  conquer  our  way  into  the  terri¬ 
tory  of  synthetic  thinking. 

The  first  problem  which  emerges  when  we 
confront  this  necessity  has  to  do  with  the 
nature  of  truth  itself.  Here  we  have  a  funda¬ 
mental  issue,  and  the  way  in  which  we  meet  it 
will  determine  in  the  most  vital  fashion  our 
relation  to  everything  else  which  has  impor¬ 
tance  for  our  thinking  and  for  our  living.  So 
fundamental  and  far  reaching  are  the  matters 


16  SYNTHETIC  CHRISTIANITY 


at  stake  at  this  point  that  it  deserves  our  most 
thorough  attention.  And  the  most  fruitful 
fashion  in  which  we  can  approach  the  discus¬ 
sion  is  by  a  consideration  of  the  way  in  which 
truth  has  been  regarded  especially  by  the 
thinkers  who  belong  to  the  historical  continu¬ 
ity  of  intellectual  pursuits  in  the  civilization 
of  the  West.  We  can  take  time  for  reference 
to  at  least  the  typical  thinkers  who  have  given 
character  to  the  whole  great  argument  as  the 
centuries  have  passed  along. 

That  sixth  century,  when  Greek  thinkers 
first  undertook  what  in  a  critical  sense  may 
be  called  speculation,  was  far  enough  from  us 
in  its  ways  of  thought.  Distinctions  which 
seem  commonplaces  to  us  had  never  been 
made,  and  assumptions  which  we  would  find 
impossible  were  made  in  the  most  natural 
fashion.  But  certain  matters  can  be  lifted 
from  all  the  clutter  of  mythology  and  primi¬ 
tive  thought.  There  is  such  a  thing  as  change. 
And  yet  there  is  a  unity  which  maintains 
itself  through  the  change.  So  the  problem 
presented  itself  to  Thales,  and  he  found  in 
water  with  its  obvious  changes  the  principle 
which  harmonized  unity  with  diversity. 
Truth  to  Thales  was  found  in  that  which  pos¬ 
sessed  capacity  for  change  and  yet  was  char¬ 
acterized  by  fundamental  unity  of  life.  Of 


TRIUMPHANT  TRUTH 


17 


course  the  matter  could  not  remain  here.  The 
Eleatics  believed  in  stability,  and  they 
believed  in  it  so  deeply  that  their  explanation 
of  life  made  change  impossible.  Heraclitus 
believed  in  change,  and  he  made  it  so  com¬ 
pletely  controlling  that  stability  ceased  to 
have  a  place  in  his  thought.  To  the  Eleatics 
truth  was  stability.  To  Heraclitus  truth  was 
change.  The  mood  of  the  Eleatics  has  per¬ 
sisted  in  all  the  conservatisms  of  the  world. 
The  mood  of  Heraclitus  has  persisted  in  all 
the  activities  of  radicals  in  every  generation. 
It  wras  inevitable  that  a  new  attitude  should 
now  develop  if  the  mind  of  man  continued  to 
be  active.  And  with  the  Greeks  it  remained 
very  active  indeed.  Democritus  felt  that  a 
way  of  uniting  the  truth  as  regards  stability 
and  the  truth  as  regards  change  must  be 
found.  His  atomic  theory  makes  the  stability 
to  lie  in  the  constitution  of  the  atoms  and 
the  change  in  their  varied  relations.  To  De¬ 
mocritus  truth  was  in  reconciliation.  The 
Pythagoreans  had  discovered  the  endless 
wonder  of  the  relations  of  number.  Here 
was  an  exhaustless  world  of  unfolding  rela¬ 
tionships  unbroken  by  the  hazards  of  human 
life  and  completely  coherent  and  harmonious. 
Truth,  it  began  to  be  suspected,  lay  in  mathe¬ 
matical  relationships.  Anaxagoras,  feeling 


18  SYNTHETIC  CHRISTIANITY 


dimly  beyond  the  mutability  of  human  life  and 
the  hard  mutations  of  things,  caught  a  pre¬ 
liminary  view  of  the  possibility  of  thinking 
of  governing  mind  as  the  basis  of  everything 
else.  In  the  meantime  the  alert  and  versatile 
men  of  Athens  had  discovered  that  the  human 
mind  is  an  instrument  of  wonderful  play  and 
of  endless  agility.  The  sheer  delight  of  the 
mental  game  allured  them.  The  practical 
power  of  the  man  who  by  clever  argument 
could  draw  men  to  his  way  of  thinking  fasci¬ 
nated  them.  They  began  to  develop  an  art  of 
argument,  not  for  the  purpose  of  finding  truth 
but  for  the  purpose  of  reducing  an  opponent 
to  discomfort  and  of  carrying  an  assembly. 
This,  of  course,  was  not  a  form  of  the  quest  for 
truth.  It  was  a  relinquishing  of  the  quest  at 
the  very  moment  when  the  instruments  of  the 
quest  were  being  used.  The  enemies  of  truth 
had  appeared  in  its  own  household.  But  back 
of  all  the  adroit  unscrupulousness  was  a  sense 
that  the  quest  was  hard  and  that  there  was 
no  goal.  And  so  fundamental  skepticism 
began  to  appear.  Clearly,  a  new  direction 
must  be  found  if  thought  was  to  move  forward 
to  new  triumphs.  In  Socrates  a  new  type  of 
critical  mind  was  found.  Clever  and  adroit 
as  the  Sophists,  he  used  all  his  skill  to  clear 
the  field  and  make  way  for  certain  command- 


TRIUMPHANT  TRUTH 


19 


ing  conceptions.  The  view  of  Protagoras  was 
that  the  individual  is  the  measure  of  all 
things,  sounding,  it  is  true,  the  democratic 
note,  hut  in  such  a  fashion  as  to  open  the  way 
for  intellectual  anarchy,  for  if  the  individual 
is  the  final  measure  of  truth,  there  will  he  as 
many  kinds  of  truth  as  there  are  individuals ; 
that  is,  there  will  he  no  truth  at  all.  It  was 
this  insight  which  was  fundamental  with 
Socrates.  He  saw  the  necessity  of  rising 
above  the  eccentricity  of  the  individual,  and 
so  he  lifted  the  thought  of  the  class  as  the 
determining  factor.  Over  against  the  indi¬ 
vidual  man  he  put  humanity.  Over  against 
the  isolated  unit  he  put  the  group.  Truth 
was  to  be  found  in  the  general  rather  than  in 
the  particular,  in  the  class  rather  than  in  the 
particular  member  of  the  class.  This  sharp 
definition  made  way  for  a  great  forward  move¬ 
ment.  Carrying  this  set  of  principles  much 
further,  Plato,  sadly  convinced  of  the  par¬ 
tiality  and  inadequacy  of  that  which  comes 
to  us  in  this  transitory  experience,  lifted  the 
thought  of  the  class  into  a  conception  of  a 
system  of  fundamental  truths,  the  ultimate 
realities  permanently  existing  as  the  founda¬ 
tion  and  the  goal  of  all  that  truth,  hints  of 
which  we  find  in  this  phenomenal  world.  This 
world  of  ideas  was  the  ultimate  reality.  Only 


20  SYNTHETIC  CHRISTIANITY 


by  participating  in  that  reality  did  anything 
belonging  to  this  world  and  this  life  secure  a 
measure  of  reality  for  itself.  Secure  in  eternal 
splendor,  the  world  of  ideas  remained  the 
pure  and  changeless  truth  of  things.  Aristotle 
was  trained  in  this  way  of  thinking,  but  his 
shrewd  and  practical  mind  found  many  dif¬ 
ficulties.  He  saw  that  it  was  easy  so  to 
express  the  thought  of  Plato  as  to  make  truth 
a  remote  and  abstract  thing  and  to  reflect 
unpleasantly  upon  all  the  meaning  and  possi¬ 
bilities  of  the  experience  which  comes  to  men 
here  and  now.  He  could  not  avoid  the  feeling 
that  truth  comes  to  light  in  the  relationships 
of  this  present  order  and  is  not  to  be  pushed 
away  as  something  whose  actuality  is  entirely 
beyond  them.  At  the  heart  of  his  thinking  he 
accepted  more  of  Plato’s  transcendental  view 
than  he  himself  probably  realized,  but  he  was 
characteristically  what  we  should  call  a  man 
of  scientific  temperament  and  method  and  his 
great  work  was  in  the  analysis  of  the  proc¬ 
esses  and  possibilities  of  thought  and  in  the 
classification  of  all  the  branches  of  human 
knowledge  which  came  within  the  ken  of  a 
man  of  his  time  and  of  his  insight.  For  prac¬ 
tical  purposes  Aristotle  found  that  truth  lay 
in  clear  and  logical  thinking  and  in  depend¬ 
able  classification. 


TRIUMPHANT  TRUTH 


21 


Conduct  rather  than  a  sense  of  the  ultimate 
mysteries  began  to  engross  the  Greek  think¬ 
ers.  The  Stoics  began  to  apprehend  a  con¬ 
tinuity  and  a  meaning  in  the  course  of  nature 
itself.  The  truth  of  living  was  to  be  found 
precisely  in  life  according  to  nature.  This 
life  was  to  be  one  of  rigid  virtue,  of  noble  self- 
control.  So  the  truth  of  things  became  one 
with  the  virtuous  life.  The  Epicureans,  seek¬ 
ing  a  complete  deliverance  from  the  fear  of 
the  gods  and  the  fear  of  death,  accepted  the 
atomic  theory  of  Democritus.  But  their  cen¬ 
tral  insistence  was  upon  happiness  as  the  goal 
of  life.  This  pleasure,  with  the  nobler  mem¬ 
bers  of  the  school  as  with  Epicurus,  its 
founder,  was  a  serene  and  noble  and  gracious 
thing.  But  in  the  hands  of  more  passionately 
lawless  men  it  was  easy  to  make  the  principles 
of  the  school  a  basis  for  a  life  of  indulgence. 
It  was  easy  to  carry  the  principles  of  the  vari¬ 
ous  Greek  schools  to  extremes,  and  this  was 
often  done. 

The  really  creative  period  of  Greek  think¬ 
ing  passed  by  and  the  center  of  the  intellec¬ 
tual  life  of  the  world  shifted  from  Athens  to 
Rome.  The  genius  of  Rome  was  practical 
rather  than  theoretical,  and  while  men  like 
Seneca  and  Marcus  Aurelius  added  new 
laurels  to  the  Stoic  faith,  and  Lucretius  put 


22  SYNTHETIC  CHRISTIANITY 


Epicureanism  into  beautiful  Latin  poetry,  the 
really  creative  qualities  of  thought  did  not 
often  appear  in  Latin  writing.  As  the  cen¬ 
turies  passed,  certain  regions  were  explored 
with  enthusiastic  energy.  The  idealism  of 
Plato  was  capable  of  inspiring  a  kind  of  rap¬ 
turous  mysticism  which  might  easily  become 
the  basis  of  a  commanding  philosophic  inter¬ 
pretation.  This,  indeed,  was  the  very  signifi¬ 
cance  of  the  work  of  Plotinus  in  the  third  cen¬ 
tury  A.  D.  In  a  way  Plato  dominated  such 
thinking  as  there  was  in  the  earlier  part  of 
the  Middle  Ages.  The  reality  of  the  “idea” 
rather  than  the  individual  easily  became  the 
reality  of  the  institution  rather  than  of  the 
units  which  composed  it  and  this  fitted  in 
wonderfully  well  with  the  growing  power  of 
the  church  and  its  consciousness  of  its  own 
life  as  well  as  with  the  thoughts  about  the 
sacrament  of  the  Lord’s  Supper  which  were 
growing  in  men’s  minds.  With  the  appear¬ 
ance  of  the  Holy  Roman  Empire  another  ele¬ 
ment  in  a  world  situation  which  was  adjusted 
in  the  completest  fashion  to  the  Mediaeval 
realism  had  made  its  place  in  the  thought  of 
man.  To  the  typical  mind  of  the  Middle  Ages 
truth  lay  in  those  solidarities  which  gave 
order  to  the  life  of  man,  to  the  church  and 
the  state  as  expressions  in  human  life  of  the 


TRIUMPHANT  TRUTH 


23 


reign  of  God,  the  ultimate  reality  of  all.  Such 
theories  and  the  practice  which  came  out  of 
them  inevitably  tended  to  crush  out  many  a 
liberty  of  the  individual.  So  criticism  became 
inevitable.  A  typical  voice  representing  the 
new  mood  is  that  of  Abelard,  and  his  Sic  et 
Non  announces  the  arrival  of  the  critical 
mind.  With  a  sort  of  inevitable  logical  pre¬ 
cision  the  criticism  of  the  Realism  of  the 
Middle  Ages  took  the  form  of  asserting  that 
the  general  way  was  only  a  name  and  that 
the  truth  of  things  was  to  be  found  in  the 
individual.  Thus  Nominalism  took  its  rise. 
So  the  assertiveness  of  the  individual  and  the 
power  of  the  church  and  the  claims  of  the 
world  state  met  in  the  minds  of  men  in  the 
Middle  Ages.  The  seed  was  being  sown  for 
the  Protestant  Revolt.  The  attempt  to  medi¬ 
ate  between  the  free-moving  individual  mind 
and  the  authority  of  the  church  led  to  the  sort 
of  attempt  at  compromise  which  bodes  ill  for 
the  interests  of  truth  itself.  The  suggestion 
of  two  kinds  of  truth  and  that  a  thing  might 
be  true  for  the  mind  of  man  but  false  because 
of  the  authority  of  the  church  meant  that  men 
were  entering  a  blind  alley  where  truth  itself 
was  being  robbed  of  its  sanctity.  There  was 
endless  intellectual  adroitness  developed  in 
the  whole  period.  And  there  were  attempts 


24  SYNTHETIC  CHRISTIANITY 


to  find  the  psychological  basis  of  truth  which 
was  put  in  the  will  by  Duns  Scotus  and  in  the 
mind  by  Thomas  Aquinas. 

Modern  thinking  really  begins  with  Des¬ 
cartes.  Once  more  mathematics  was  in  process 
of  making  great  strides.  And  once  more  a 
really  critical  mind  with  a  constructive  enthu¬ 
siasm  back  of  all  its  processes  had  arrived. 
Descartes  began  by  doubting  everything  it 
was  possible  to  doubt.  And  so  at  last  he  was 
confronted  by  his  capacity  to  think  which  he 
could  not  question  and  step  by  step  moved 
out  until  God  and  the  reality  of  the  world  of 
experience  were  safely  brought  back.  In 
working  out  the  detail  of  his  thinking 
Descartes  more  and  more  set  thought  and 
extension  as  over  against  each  other,  yet  some¬ 
how  related.  If  all  the  while  the  very  quest 
of  philosophy  is  the  seeking  of  that  which 
exists  in  its  own  right  and  independence,  the 
really  substantial  basis  of  all,  it  is  clear  that 
the  dualism  between  thought  and  extension 
suggests  that  there  is  a  longer  journey  to  take. 
This  journey  was,  as  a  matter  of  fact,  taken 
by  Spinoza,  who  regarded  both  thought  and 
extension  as  merely  the  attributes  of  the  ulti¬ 
mate  reality.  But  in  Spinoza’s  hands  this  ulti¬ 
mate  reality  became  a  process  so  bound  by 
necessity,  so  empty  of  creative  freedom  that  it 


TRIUMPHANT  TRUTH 


25 


proved  incapable  of  bolding  the  minds  of  men 
searching  for  a  reality  at  least  commensurate 
with  their  own  sense  of  creative  action.  The 
problem  of  connecting  the  world  of  thought 
and  the  world  of  things  was  still  engrossing 
men’s  minds.  Leibnitz  by  his  theory  of 
monads  and  preestablished  harmony  tried 
to  bridge  the  chasm.  It  w^as  a  brilliant  theory, 
but  it  left  a  sense  of  life  as  something  whose 
basis  was  a  sort  of  artificial  system  of  me¬ 
chanics.  And  the  mind  of  man  cannot  rest  in 
conceptions  which  are  not  really  organic.  The 
English  philosopher  Locke  turned  from  vast 
and  alluring  fields  of  speculation  and  tried 
within  rather  close  limits  to  see  how  the  mind 
works  and  what  assumptions  we  must  make 
for  the  practical  purposes  of  life.  So  arose 
the  sensational  approach  to  philosophic 
thought.  Sensation  and  reflection  give  us  all 
the  material  about  which  we  think  and  con¬ 
cerning  which  we  act.  It  is  clearly  seen  that 
some  things  at  least  are  modified  by  our  men¬ 
tal  experience  of  them  and  that  sensation  is 
not  so  simple  a  thing  as  at  first  appeared. 
Moving  out  from  this  study  of  the  process  of 
the  mind  in  apprehending,  Berkeley  made  the 
bold  declaration  that  there  is  no  reality  out¬ 
side  the  mind.  Things  are  just  the  mental 
experience  of  which  we  are  conscious  in  sen- 


26  SYNTHETIC  CHRISTIANITY 


sation.  If  there  were  no  minds,  there  would 
he  no  things.  By  referring  everything  at  last 
to  the  mind  of  God,  Berkeley  escaped  some 
difficulties  which  would  immediately  have 
confronted  him  had  the  mind  of  man  been  his 
ultimate  reality.  Hume  in  a  daring  process 
of  analysis  took  the  next  critical  step  and 
denied  the  existence  of  that  unified  mental 
life  upon  which  Berkeley  staked  everything. 
The  difficulty  with  his  brilliant  process  of 
argument,  as  it  is  rather  easy  for  us  now  to 
see,  is  precisely  that  at  every  step  he  found 
it  necessary  to  assume  for  the  purposes  of 
argument  the  very  things  which  he  denied  in 
his  conclusion.  It  was  evident  that  the  whole 
process  of  human  experience  must  be  sub¬ 
jected  to  an  even  more  searching  criticism  at 
the  hands  of  some  thinker  who  in  all  his  work 
cherished  a  constructive  purpose.  And  now  in 
the  critical  hour  the  critically  important  man 
arrived.  Immanuel  Kant  in  his  far  town  in 
Germany  brought  one  epoch  in  the  history  of 
philosophy  to  an  end  and  inaugurated  an¬ 
other.  The  Critique  of  Pure  Reason  estab¬ 
lished  permanently  the  share  of  the  mind  in 
the  whole  process  of  apprehending  and  utiliz¬ 
ing  reality,  a  share  so  fundamental  and  so  far 
reaching  that  it  is  only  possible  to  have  expe¬ 
rience  under  terms  which  the  mind  brings  to 


TRIUMPHANT  TRUTH 


27 


it.  This  makes  it  clear  that  we  must  think 
of  things  in  certain  ways  if  we  are  to  think 
of  them  at  all,  but  it  does  not  at  all  prove  that 
the  ultimate  reality  corresponds  to  our 
thought  of  it.  In  fact,  it  leaves  us  with  a  phe¬ 
nomenal  world,  where  we  must  move  in  a  cer¬ 
tain  fashion,  and  a  real  world  quite  out  of 
the  reach  of  the  processes  of  rationality.  From 
this  pessimistic  conclusion  Kant  attempts  to 
save  us  by  the  Critique  of  Practical  Reason. 
Here  the  acceptance  of  those  postulates  which 
are  necessary  as  the  basis  of  the  moral  and 
spiritual  life  is  argued  not  as  a  matter  of 
mathematical  reason  but  as  a  necessary 
method  of  securing  postulates  upon  which  we 
can  build  the  fullest  life  for  man.  The  phe¬ 
nomenal  side  of  experience  seemed  itself  the 
worthy  basis  of  a  philosophy  which  discarded 
any  ultimate  questions,  and  Comte  in  the 
Positivist  philosophy  set  about  the  practical 
classification  of  the  materials  of  the  phenom¬ 
enal  world  as  the  real  task  of  the  mind.  To 
Fichte  it  seemed  that  Kant’s  “thing  in  itself” 
beyond  the  reach  of  the  rational  mind  was  a 
needless  and  useless  thing.  The  self  which 
apprehended  by  means  of  processes  of  its  own 
was  the  ultimate  reality.  Schelling  saw  in  the 
reality  apprehended  by  the  spiritual  processes 
an  ultimate  fact.  It  was  inevitable  that  a 


28  SYNTHETIC  CHRISTIANITY 


synthesis  doing  justice  to  all  these  fragmen¬ 
tary  insights  would  be  sought,  and  this  was 
the  endeavor  of  the  powerful  thinker,  Hegel. 
The  logical  process  was  the  movement  of  a 
fundamental  reality  expressing  itself  in  all 
the  experiences  of  life.  This  process  was  of 
the  nature  of  the  absolute  itself,  and  as  thesis, 
antithesis,  and  synthesis  expressed  itself  in 
the  world  without  and  the  world  within,  com¬ 
ing  to  consciousness  at  last  in  the  mind  of 
man.  In  such  a  view  as  this  the  structural 
nature  of  the  mind  was  the  fundamental 
matter.  It  gave  a  new  meaning  to  history,  to 
art,  and  to  life.  It  was  the  basis  of  a  glow¬ 
ing  and  expectant  optimism.  Over  against 
this  Schopenhauer  put  his  searching  pessi¬ 
mism  with  its  emphasis  upon  the  will  rather 
than  upon  the  mind  of  man.  The  main  out¬ 
lines  of  modern  thought  had  now  been  laid. 
The  clear  synthetic  analysis  which  tried  to 
avoid  ultimate  questions  was  carried  further 
in  brilliant  fashion  by  Herbert  Spencer.  The 
view  of  the  structure  of  the  mind  as  offering 
the  basis  for  a  triumphant  ideal  of  rationality 
as  the  core  of  reality  became  the  basis  of  a 
great  idealistic  movement.  The  sense  of  per¬ 
sonality  as  fundamental  and  all  interpreting 
when  combined  with  idealistic  positions  be¬ 
came  the  basis  of  personal  idealism.  The  view 


TRIUMPHANT  TRUTH 


29 


that  the  intellect  must  take  a  lower  place  in 
philosophic  speculation  and  that  life  itself 
has  the  right  of  way  in  interpretation  as  well 
as  in  experience  became  the  basis  of  the  Prag¬ 
matism  of  Schiller  and  James,  the  Activitism 
of  Eucken,  and  the  Creative  Evolution  of  Berg¬ 
son.  The  attempt  to  find  a  meeting  place  for 
all  the  facts  which  would  not  reduce  the  objec¬ 
tive  world  to  a  phenomenal  existence  led  to 
the  speculations  of  the  Neo-Realists.  The 
brilliant  achievements  of  a  growing  mathe¬ 
matical  science  suggested  again  the  thought 
that  new  insights  coming  from  an  advanced 
mathematics  might  offer  the  key  to  many  a 
problem.  So  in  ever-changing  form,  idealism 
and  realism  and  various  half-way  houses  have 
furnished  homes  for  the  minds  of  men  in  our 
time.  The  man  with  a  working  hypothesis 
organizing  the  material  nearest  to  him  and 
hesitant  about  far-reaching  generalizations  is 
perhaps  the  typical  man  of  the  intellectual 
life  in  our  period. 

Even  this  hurried  and  summary  survey, 
with  many  a  great  name  omitted  and  many  a 
significant  movement  passed  by,  suggests  that 
the  history  of  man’s  attempt  to  find  truth  has 
been  a  chronicle  of  checkered  and  difficult 
struggle.  It  has  been  a  story  of  constant  and 
inevitable  conflicts.  It  has  been  the  tale  of 


30  SYNTHETIC  CHRISTIANITY 


the  perpetual  battle  of  “either — or.”  We  are 
tempted  to  feel  that  we  are  quite  lost  in  the 
swirling  tempest  of  conflicting  conceptions. 
If  we  believe  in  unity,  it  seems  that  we  must 
fight  the  belief  in  variety.  If  wTe  believe  in 
solidarity,  it  seems  that  we  must  lose  the 
belief  in  freedom.  If  we  believe  in  mind,  we 
seem  to  behold  the  material  world  disappear¬ 
ing  from  our  view. 

On  the  other  hand,  if  we  believe  in  freedom, 
we  seem  to  watch  the  disappearance  of  law; 
and  if  we  believe  in  the  matter,  we  watch  the 
disintegration  of  the  mind.  If  we  believe  in 
life,  we  have  difficulties  with  logic ;  and  if  we 
believe  in  logic,  we  have  difficulties  with  life. 
It  is  tremendously  interesting  to  find  that  all 
critical  thinkers  have  found  it  easy  to  do  de¬ 
structive  work.  But  when  they  came  to  con¬ 
struction  it  seemed  that  they  .were  merely 
erecting  an  edifice  for  the  destruction  of  some 
clear-minded  antagonist  who  would  see  that 
what  was  meant  to  be  a  palace  of  the  mind  was 
only  a  house  of  cards.  If  in  the  light  of  all 
this  a  man  feels  tempted  to  take  an  attitude  of 
universal  skepticism,  he  can  only  justify  this 
position  by  the  use  of  mental  utensils  which 
presuppose  the  validity  of  positions  which  he 
is  trying  to  destroy. 

In  the  light  of  all  this,  we  come  to  a  closer 


TRIUMPHANT  TRUTH 


31 


inspection  of  those  thinkers  like  Democritus 
who  have  tried  to  find  a  unity  which  included 
the  really  vital  assertions  in  opposing  views. 
We  become  willing  to  try  as  a  working  hy¬ 
pothesis  at  least  the  conception  of  Hegel  that 
there  is  a  synthesis  which  will  harmonize  the 
truths  lying  in  every  thesis  and  its  antithesis. 
We  become  ready  to  look  upon  the  task  of 
interpretation  as  a  synthetic  endeavor.  Just 
as  soon  as  we  take  up  this  position  new  light 
begins  to  fall  upon  many  problems.  We  dis¬ 
cover  that  very  often  positions  which  seem  to 
contradict  each  other  can  only  exist  by  means 
of  each  other.  Stability  can  have  no  meaning 
in  living  experience  apart  from  change.  And 
change  has  no  solid  meaning  apart  from  sta¬ 
bility.  The  mind  has  no  material  to  work 
upon  without  objective  experience.  And  the 
world  of  objects  is  empty  enough  apart  from 
the  perception  and  activities  of  knowing 
minds.  It  is  not  merely  that  assertions  which 
seem  to  oppose  each  other  need  in  a  larger 
view  to  find  that  supplement  which  they  give 
to  each  other.  This  is  true.  But,  deeper  than 
this,  when  we  analyze  closely  we  find  coiling 
in  the  heart  of  an  assertion  the  very  postulate 
which  we  are  at  the  moment  tempted  to  put 
over  against  it.  You  can  always  find  the  cor¬ 
rective  of  a  system  in  some  premise  essential 


32  SYNTHETIC  CHRISTIANITY 


to  the  position  of  the  system  itself.  The  study 
of  the  history  of  philosophy  is  pretty  largely 
the  tale  of  the  emerging  of  neglected  truths. 
But  the  tragedy  of  the  history  of  philosophy 
is  precisely  the  fashion  in  which  any  truth 
when  once  it  has  emerged  wants  to  dominate 
the  whole  landscape.  There  is  a  kind  of  curi¬ 
ous  assertiveness  about  particular  truths  as 
we  watch  their  behavior  in  the  history  of 
thought.  Each  truth  at  some  stage  of  his¬ 
tory  wants  to  be  considered  the  only  truth. 
Somehow  we  must  teach  our  truths  to  live  to¬ 
gether.  For  a  truth  which  wants  to  kill  all 
the  other  members  of  the  family  when  it  comes 
to  the  throne  always  turns  into  a  falsehood. 
It  is  this  sort  of  thing  against  which  the 
synthetic  mind  is  always  on  its  guard.  It  has 
an  eye  always  open  for  the  self-willed  and 
spirited  truth  which  wants  to  take  the  bit  in 
its  teeth  and  go  galloping  away.  If  you  look 
at  it  in  one  fashion,  the  history  of  philosophy 
is  the  story  of  a  succession  of  intellectual 
runaways. 

When  we  begin  to  have  some  genuine  appre¬ 
hension  of  the  power  of  truths  to  supplement 
each  other,  when  we  begin  to  see  the  fashion 
in  which  one  involves  the  other,  when  we  catch 
a  glimpse  of  that  organism  of  truths  which 
is  the  very  constitution  of  reality,  we  become 


TRIUMPHANT  TRUTH 


33 


by  the  very  nature  of  these  insights  synthetic 
thinkers.  And  as  we  go  on  with  our  work 
we  develop  eagerness  to  find  some  principle 
or  set  of  principles,  some  fact  or  circle  of  facts, 
some  process  or  some  experience  about  which 
we  can  organize  everything  else  in  our  con 
structive  thinking.  We  become  pilgrims  seek¬ 
ing  for  a  principle  of  synthesis  and  a  method 
of  coordination.  And  when  we  have  reached 
this  position  we  are  ready  for  a  new  and 
searching  inspection  of  the  Christian  religion. 
We  are  now  ready  to  study  truth  as  it  emerges 
in  the  Christian  experience  of  life. 

At  the  very  beginning  we  find  the  work  of 
harmonizing  in  operation.  For  we  are  not 
now  studying  truth  apart  from  life  and  we 
are  not  studying  life  apart  from  truth.  We 
are  studying  truth  in  action.  We  are  study¬ 
ing  life  inspired  by  truth.  We  do  not  mean 
by  these  sentences  to  be  begging  the  question 
as  to  just  what  amount  of  truth  the  Christian 
religion  contains.  We  only  mean  to  assert 
that  the  conception  which  we  find  emerging 
in  Christianity  of  its  own  nature  involves  the 
thought  that  it  is  a  religion  of  truth  in  action. 
Here  we  find  at  once  the  most  genuine  points 
of  contact  with  many  a  vital  aspect  of  con¬ 
temporary  thinking.  We  can  easily  under¬ 
stand  the  attraction  which  Christianity  pos- 


34  SYNTHETIC  CHRISTIANITY 


sesses  for  a  mind  like  that  of  Professor 
Encken  when  we  approach  it  in  this  fashion. 
We  can  see  how  it  possesses  a  kinship  to  char¬ 
acteristic  assertions  of  Professor  Bergson. 
And  we  can  see  how  easily  it  speaks  in  lan¬ 
guage  often  used  by  the  pragmatist.  There 
have  been  religions  which  made  little  demand 
of  thought,  and  there  has  been  thought  which 
has  had  little  connection  with  religion.  The 
very  history  of  the  greatest  moments  of  the 
Christian  religion  shows  how  it  lifts  thought 
to  commanding  passion  and  sends  it  forth  in 
productive  action.  The  thinkers  of  the  world 
have  too  often  been  spectators.  The  men  of 
brilliant  action  have  too  often  lacked  clear 
and  consistent  thought.  But  in  the  Christian 
religion  the  philosophy  of  life  is  alive  as  an 
inspiration  to  conduct.  Thought  and  action 
meet  in  harmony  in  the  living  synthesis  of  the 
Christian  life. 

As  we  continue  our  investigation  we  find 
that  in  Christianity  the  intellect  and  the  will 
each  come  to  their  own.  To  be  sure,  they  have 
not  always  come  equally  into  emphasis  in 
individual  thinkers  who  bore  the  Christian 
name.  We  do  not  forget  the  battle  between 
the  Thomists  and  the  Scottists  in  the  Middle 
Ages.  But,  surveyed  in  a  large  and  under¬ 
standing  way,  the  Christian  faith  in  action 


TRIUMPHANT  TRUTH 


35 


in  the  world  reveals  a  great  appeal  to  the  in¬ 
tellect  which  is  at  the  same  time  a  great  appeal 
to  the  will.  The  deepest  thing  which  Hegel 
was  trying  to  say  about  the  mind  and  the 
deepest  thing  which  Schopenhauer  was  trying 
to  say  about  the  will  come  to  full  expression 
in  the  Christian  religion.  And  it  is  entirely 
free  from  the  colorless  abstractions  into  which 
Hegelianism  so  easily  fell  and  from  the 
abysmal  pessimism  which  clouded  the  thought 
of  Schopenhauer.  Christianity  is  the  farthest 
remove  from  those  religions  which  are  satis¬ 
fied  by  a  routine  of  ritual  which  never  speaks 
to  the  mind.  At  the  same  time  it  is  anything 
but  a  process  of  dialectic  where  mental  activ¬ 
ity  is  made  the  substitute  for  moral  action. 
All  the  while  there  is  the  most  searching 
demand  that  the  mind  think  closely  and 
c] early  and  profoundly.  There  is  a  tremen¬ 
dous  dialectic  implicit  in  the  Christian  faith. 
But  at  the  very  moment  when  we  say  this  we 
must  also  say  that  it  is  a  bugle  blast  sum¬ 
moning  men  to  action.  Its  ideas  all  turn  into 
conduct.  Its  thought  is  always  the  reverse 
side  of  action.  It  is  a  perpetual  builder  of 
character.  It  is  a  synthesis  in  which  the 
processes  of  thought  and  the  processes  of  ac¬ 
tion  work  happily  together. 

The  study  of  the  genius  of  Christianity  re- 


36  SYNTHETIC  CHRISTIANITY 


veals  the  fact  that  it  offers  a  possible  recon¬ 
ciliation  of  the  conceptions  of  stability  and 
change.  The  God  whom  it  preaches  is  not  a 
majestic  abstraction  lost  in  the  colorless  dis¬ 
tance  of  his  own  infinity.  He  is  not  a  lifeless 
Absolute  in  whose  awful  vastness  all  distinc¬ 
tions  lose  their  meaning.  He  is  eternal  action. 
His  very  nature  is  that  of  perfect  and  per¬ 
petual  activity.  Not  Heraclitus  himself 
offered  a  universe  where  the  vast  processes  of 
change  were  more  definitely  recognized.  But 
this  perpetual  activity,  this  constant  change, 
is  not  movement  without  order  or  action  with¬ 
out  a  clearly  defined  and  stable  basis.  If  God 
is  a  God  of  deeds,  he  is  also  a  God  of  char¬ 
acter.  All  of  this  manifold  and  ceaseless 
activity,  all  of  this  process  of  perpetual 
change,  is  based  upon  the  solid  strength  of  the 
nature  of  a  God  to  whom  goodness  and  order 
and  harmony  are  of  the  very  essence  of  life. 
The  Eleatics  made  the  universe  incapable  of 
real  movement  in  their  passion  for  stability. 
Christianity  finds  a  sure  basis  for  stability  in 
the  character  of  God,  but  leaves  infinite  room 
for  movement  and  action.  Heraclitus  was  so 
sure  of  movement  and  change  that  he  found 
no  adequate  stability  at  the  heart  of  things. 
Christianity  finds  infinite  room  for  all  the 
variety  of  movement  and  change  and  yet  has 


TRIUMPHANT  TRUTH 


37 


a  solid  basis  for  all  this  wonder  of  perpetual 
activity  and  change. 

The  same  problem  emerges  in  another  form 
in  the  questions  which  have  to  do  with  free¬ 
dom  and  necessity.  Here  again  particular 
thinkers  have  been  advocates  of  the  partial 
rather  than  of  the  complete.  But  when  we 
view  Christianity  in  the  largest  way  we  find 
that  it  does  ample  justice  to  the  place  of  free¬ 
dom  while  it  clearly  recognizes  the  limitations 
of  freedom.  Every  summons  in  the  calls  to 
goodness  which  we  find  in  the  Old  Testament 
and  the  New  is  based  upon  the  implicit  as¬ 
sumption  of  a  royal  freedom,  of  a  capacity  for 
responsible  choice.  And  with  all  this  there  is 
a  conception  never  far  from  view  that  the 
ultimate  matters  of  goodness  are  deeper  than 
any  matter  of  choice.  They  are  structural 
necessities  in  the  universe.  They  are  a  part 
of  the  very  character  of  God.  The  result  is 
that  you  are  never  plunged  into  anarchy  for 
the  sake  of  freedom  and  you  are  never  plunged 
into  tyranny  for  the  sake  of  law.  And  the 
testimony  of  Christianity  on  the  larger  field 
of  history  reveals  the  same  emphasis.  In  dark¬ 
est  hours  men  of  many  a  century  and  of  many 
a  land  have  found  their  faith  confirmed  as 
they  have  meditated  upon  that  place  of  struc¬ 
tural  necessity  which  goodness  occupies  in  the 


38  SYNTHETIC  CHRISTIANITY 


life  of  God.  It  has  made  their  faith  as  solid 
as  Gibraltar.  And  all  the  while  they  have 
found  in  their  experience  of  the  things  of  God 
a  creative  freedom  of  the  very  genius  of  the 
loftiest  and  completest  sort  of  liberty.  It  is 
not  so  much  that  Christianity  has  represented 
a  dialectical  process  in  defense  of  this  har¬ 
monizing  of  freedom  and  necessity.  It  is  just 
that  the  two  have  lived  together  in  vital  har¬ 
mony  in  the  actual  experience  of  the  Christian 

m 

religion.  And,  of  course,  this  actual  experi¬ 
ence  of  harmony  is  the  very  basis  of  the  only 
possible  dialectic  to  provide  theoretical  ex¬ 
pression  of  this  harmony. 

When  man  becomes  aware  of  the  range  and 
marvel  of  his  own  mental  powers  there  arises 
the  temptation  to  misuse  them  for  selfish  ends, 
by  adroit  processes  of  argument  to  make  the 
worse  appear  the  better  reason,  to  lose  all 
sense  of  moral  responsibility  in  vivid  and 
dramatic  mental  action.  We  have  seen  how 
just  this  sort  of  thing  injected  large  elements 
of  irresponsibility  and  intellectual  dishonesty 
into  the  activities  of  Sophists.  When  we  have 
apprehended  the  nature  of  the  problem  which 
this  sort  of  situation  develops  we  find  that  in 
the  most  definite  way  Christianity  enables  us 
to  meet  it.  On  the  one  hand  it  is  a  religion 
which  encourages  and,  indeed,  makes  inevi- 


TRIUMPHANT  TRUTH 


39 


table  the  most  daring  use  of  the  mind.  The 
processes  by  which  Paul  broke  away  from  the 
legalism  which  chained  his  people  represent 
an  amazing  quality  of  sheer  intellectual  dar¬ 
ing.  The  Summa  of  Saint  Thomas  Aquinas 
is  built  about  the  very  principle  of  the  most 
thorough  and  searching  investigation  of 
everything  which  can  be  said  upon  all  sides  of 
every  subject  discussed.  But  while  all  this  is 
true,  and  illustrations  of  its  truth  lie  every¬ 
where  in  the  history  of  Christian  thought,  it 
is  also  true  that  the  very  genius  of  Christian¬ 
ity  is  constantly  acting  in  such  a  fashion  as 
to  prevent  intellectual  daring  from  becoming 
intellectual  irresponsibility.  In  individual 
cases,  the  inhibitions  may  not  always  prove 
effective.  But  on  the  large  field,  the  noble 
seriousness  which  is  essential  to  the  very 
character  of  the  Christian  faith  always  be¬ 
comes  operative,  and  so  a  certain  lofty  and 
splendidly  ethical  seriousness  combines  with 
the  most  astonishing  and  daring  versatility  in 
Christian  thinking.  Christian  thinkers  sooner 
or  later  incorporate  the  very  living  qualities 
of  the  thought  of  every  age,  but  before  the  end 
of  the  chapter  these  elements  are  mastered  by 
the  high  and  eternal  verities  of  the  faith 
itself.  As  Nathaniel  Hawthorne  once  put  it: 
“The  light  of  God  shines  upon  every  age 


40  SYNTHETIC  CHRISTIANITY 


through  the  colored  glass  of  its  own  cathedral 
windows,  but  it  is  the  ageless  light  shining 
through  the  colors  of  the  age.” 

The  Stoic  emphasis  upon  duty  and  the 
Epicurean  emphasis  upon  pleasure  may  seem 
to  be  poles  apart,  and  yet  these  two  principles 
find  their  reconciliation  in  the  Christian  reli¬ 
gion.  We  shall  have  more  to  say  of  this  in 
a  later  lecture.  Here  it  is  sufficient  to  remark 
that  the  moral  insistence,  the  categorical  im¬ 
perative,  nowhere  receives  greater  emphasis 
than  in  Christianity.  But  as  the  experience 
of  the  Christian  religion  unfolds  duty  itself 
becomes  transfigured.  By  the  central  experi¬ 
ence  of  the  Christian  “I  ought”  takes  on  all 
the  brightness  of  “I  wTant.”  Duty  and  desire 
are  wedded  when  desire  is  lifted  to  the  height 
of  the  loftiest  demands  of  duty.  The  very 
experience  in  which  conscience  comes  to  its 
own  is  at  its  consummation  an  experience  of 
rapturous  and  spontaneous  gladness.  So  the 
true  elements  in  the  thought  of  the  Stoic  and 
the  true  elements  in  the  thought  of  the  Epicu¬ 
rean  meet  in  a  higher  unity  in  the  Christian 
religion. 

The  student  of  Plotinus,  if  he  is  a  man  of 
profound  personal  responsiveness  and  of  deep 
feeling,  can  scarcely  fail  to  be  impressed  by 
many  an  insight  which  flashes  out  from  his 


TRIUMPHANT  TRUTH 


41 


teaching.  The  mystic  approach  to  truth  has 
fascinations  which  are  immediately  appar¬ 
ent,  and  the  candid  thinker  is  likely  at  last 
to  admit  that  there  are  aspects  of  reality 
which  can  be  approached  in  no  other  way. 
But  just  as  the  wealth  of  the  mystical  phil¬ 
osophy  is  coming  within  reach  one  begins 
to  see  that  for  every  gift  he  offers  Plotinus 
takes  something  very  valuable  away.  And  the 
world  above  the  processes  of  the  mind  where 
specific  affirmation  becomes  utterly  impos¬ 
sible  seems  a  very  empty  place  to  reach  at  the 
end  of  so  promising  a  journey.  If  we  have  the 
synthetic  habit  of  mind,  we  will  begin  to  con¬ 
sider  the  possibility  of  a  use  of  this  approach 
so  marvelously  interpreted  by  Plotinus  in 
such  a  way  as  to  keep  the  mystical  insights 
without  being  lost  in  an  experience  the  nature 
of  whose  fullness  is  such  that  it  has  no  mean¬ 
ing  which  can  be  expressed  in  the  terms  of  the 
intelligence.  When  our  minds  are  moving 
in  this  fashion,  if  we  turn  our  attention  to 
the  Christian  religion,  we  will  discover  that 
in  the  most  astonishing  fashion  mysticism  and 
the  rational  processes  meet  in  a  noble  har¬ 
mony  in  the  experience  which  is  fundamental 
in  the  Christian  life.  A  man  like  Jonathan 
Edwards  is  an  illustration  of  a  capacity  for 
mystical  experience  combined  with  a  mind  of 


42  SYNTHETIC  CHRISTIANITY 


the  most  extraordinary  acuteness  and  of  the 
most  astonishing  dialectical  power.  In 
Christianity  mystical  insights  are  perpetually 
giving  new  depth  and  richness  and  creative 
power  to  the  activities  of  the  intellect.  And 
the  processes  of  careful  and  analytical 
thought  are  all  the  while  stabilizing  and  giv¬ 
ing  intellectual  form  to  the  wealth  of  material 
which  comes  from  the  hours  of  most  illumi¬ 
nated  devotion.  Here,  again,  sometimes  the 
mystic  masters  the  thinker  in  individual 
cases.  And  sometimes  the  thinker  leaves  no 
room  in  his  method  for  the  contribution  of  the 
hour  of  mystical  insight.  But  taking  the 
largest  view,  we  may  say  that  in  Christianity 
the  mystic  makes  peace  with  the  thinker  and 
the  logical  faculty  welcomes  the  contribution 
of  the  hour  when  devotion  becomes  a  new  and 
glorious  intuition  into  the  nature  of  reality 
itself. 

The  battle  of  the  Middle  Ages  between  Real¬ 
ism  and  Nominalism  is  at  bottom  a  conflict 
between  two  sides  of  the  same  coin.  The  mood 
of  the  Realist  persists  in  the  Roman  Catholic 
Church.  The  mood  of  the  Nominalist  is 
fundamental  in  Protestantism.  But  the  cen¬ 
turies  since  the  sixteenth  have  seen  many  a 
development  in  the  direction  akin  to  the  in¬ 
sights  of  Realism  in  the  Protestant  faith  and, 


TRIUMPHANT  TRUTH 


43 


of  course,  this  was  really  happening  as  one 
aspect  of  the  thinking  of  Luther  and  Calvin 
themselves.  If  you  approach  life  from  the 
standpoint  of  the  class,  of  the  group,  of  the 
general  which  includes  the  particular,  you 
are  in  a  measure  a  Realist.  Much  has  been 
done  in  the  political  field  in  working  out  these 
principles.  And  it  is  interesting  to  see  how 
both  in  thinking  and  action  the  tendency  has 
been  toward  finding  a  higher  unity  which 
would  include  the  truth  in  both  positions.  Our 
republic  is  Nominalist  in  its  emphasis  upon 
individual  rights.  It  is  Realist  inasmuch  as 
it  emphasizes  federal  authority.  From  the 
standpoint  of  the  matters  before  us  now  it  is 
wonderfully  significant  to  find  in  what  fash¬ 
ion  the  individual  and  the  group  each  come 
to  fullness  of  meaning  in  Christianity.  If  at 
times  one  seems  to  ignore  the  rights  of  the 
other,  after  a  while  the  correcting  influence 
begins  to  be  felt.  Christianity  will  always  be 
a  glorious  individual  experience  of  the  things 
of  God.  So  the  deepest  note  of  Nominalism  is 
retained.  Christianity  will  always  be  an 
organic  brotherhood  of  men  and  women  and 
little  children  who,  in  the  oneness  of  their 
corporate  life,  find  a  new  meaning  in  faith  and 
life.  So  the  deepest  note  in  Realism  finds 
ample  expression. 


44  SYNTHETIC  CHRISTIANITY 


It  may  seem  at  first  that  such  a  note  as 
that  sounded  by  the  tremendously  thorough¬ 
going  attempt  to  doubt  everything  which 
could  be  doubted  when  Descartes  came  upon 
the  scene  expresses  something  very  remote 
from  the  attitude  of  Christianity.  As  a  matter 
of  fact,  that  brushing  aside  of  the  unessential 
and  coming  face  to  face  with  the  ultimate 
matters  of  experience  which  lay  back  of  the 
endeavor  of  Descartes  is  inherent  in  the  deep¬ 
est  life  of  the  Christian  religion.  And  again, 
as  a  matter  of  fact,  the  experience  of  Luther 
on  the  religious  side  preceded  the  experience 
of  Descartes  on  the  intellectual  side. 

We  are  prepared  by  what  has  already  been 
said  for  the  insight  that  the  positions  taken 
by  K*ant’s  Critique  of  Practical  Reason  have 
the  deepest  kinship  with  the  method  of  Chris¬ 
tianity  as  an  experience  active  in  the  lives  of 
men.  And  we  see  at  once  how  Hegel’s  thesis 
and  antithesis  and  synthesis  speak  in  the  very 
terms  according  to  which  Christianity  has 
acted  for  ages  without  the  formula.  When  we 
come  to  the  conflicts  between  systems  based 
upon  the  reason  and  philosophic  approaches 
asserting  a  higher  sanction,  we  find  that  Chris¬ 
tianity  sees  and  appropriates  the  truth  in  each 
position.  It  is  pragmatic  as  to  method.  But 
it  reaches  positions  so  firm  and  sure  that  they 


TRIUMPHANT  TRUTH 


45 


may  be  expressed  in  terms  which  in  their  own 
way  savor  of  a  philosophy  of  the  Absolute. 
Christianity  can  rejoice  in  the  spiritual  qual¬ 
ity  of  Berkeley  and  of  many  an  exponent  of 
a  fully  developed  idealism,  yet  it  understands 
fully  the  sanctions  which  the  thinkers  would 
conserve  who  insist  upon  the  ontological  real¬ 
ity  of  the  objective  world.  It  moves  to  the 
very  time  of  a  personal  philosophy,  yet  it 
meets  frankly  those  uniformities  of  the 
physical  world  which  have  been  the  basis  of 
a  materialistic  interpretation. 

Enough  has  been  said  to  indicate  in  outline 
at  least  the  synthetic  method  which  so  won¬ 
derfully  expresses  the  very  genius  of  the  Chris¬ 
tian  faith.  Indeed,  the  Christian  religion  may 
say  as  it  approaches  the  great  historic  phil¬ 
osophical  interpretations,  “I  came  not  to  de¬ 
stroy  but  to  fulfill.”  And  once  again  in  all 
the  ages  of  its  action  it  has  incorporated  some 
higher  principle  in  which  contending  inter¬ 
pretations  have  met  in  harmony.  Every  deep 
need  of  the  mind  of  man  which  has  emerged 
in  the  history  of  philosophic  speculation  has 
found  notable  and  sympathetic  expression 
somewhere  in  the  very  structure  of  the  Chris¬ 
tian  religion. 

With  all  the  ground  which  they  cover  in 
common  there  are  important  distinctions  be- 


46  SYNTHETIC  CHRISTIANITY 


tween  philosophy  and  religion.  The  one 
reaches  its  full  expression  in  analysis  and 
classification  and  interpretation.  The  other 
becomes  a  kindling  experience  filling  the  soul 
with  inspiration  and  the  life  with  enthusiasm. 
One  comes  to  a  climax  in  a  clear  light  of 
thought.  The  other  reaches  its  fruition  in  a 
blazing  fire  of  passionate  devotion.  When 
religion  touches  philosophy  it  sets  philoso¬ 
phical  principles  and  sanctions  on  fire.  And, 
like  the  burning  bush,  although  they  blaze  in 
perpetual  flame,  they  are  not  consumed.  It 
is  just  at  this  point  that  the  Christian  religion 
most  nobly  includes  and  yet  transfigures  the 
whole  circle  of  insights  which  philosophy  has 
given  to  the  world.  Philosophy  at  its  best 
gives  a  system  of  thought.  Christianity  turns 
the  system  into  a  consuming  passion.  The 
strategy  of  all  this  is  seen  most  characteristi¬ 
cally  in  the  figure  of  the  One  who  said,  “I  am 
the  truth.”  The  very  essence  of  his  person¬ 
ality  is  to  be  found  in  the  fact  that  in  him 
truth  was  alive.  It  looked  out  of  human  eyes. 
It  spoke  with  a  human  voice.  It  used  human 
hands  and  feet.  It  was  alive  in  a  human  per¬ 
sonality.  It  cast  aside  all  remoteness  and 
abstraction  and  became  infinitely  near  and 
infinitely  compelling.  And  this  truth  was  all 

0 

the  while  alive  with  the  wonder  of  victorious 


TRIUMPHANT  TRUTH 


47 


action.  It  ceased  to  be  merely  analysis  and 
became  conduct.  It  was  a  heart  and  a  con¬ 
science  as  well  as  a  mind.  All  the  elements 
of  thought  which  seem  determined  to  meet 
only  in  clenched  antagonism  find  that  they 
unite  in  a  strange  capacity  for  harmonious 
action  as  they  live  in  the  victorious  life  of  the 
personality  of  Jesus  Christ.  In  all  these  rela¬ 
tions  truth  attains  a  completely  new  power. 
It  possesses  a  wonderful  moral  contagion.  It 
is  characterized  by  a  mighty  spiritual  inspira¬ 
tion.  It  releases  the  most  amazing  potencies 
and  the  most  far-reaching  and  transforming 
energies.  And  in  doing  these  things  it  both 
reveals  and  justifies  its  inherent  quality.  It 
is  only  in  living  contact  with  the  personality 
which  is  truth  alive  that  we  reach  a  place  of 
triumphant  certainty  or  of  triumphant  action. 
So  we  come  to  know  the  truth,  and  so  the 
truth  makes  us  free. 

It  may  be  suggested  that  a  good  many  as¬ 
sumptions  which  have  been  made  very  easily 
and  without  patient  dialectical  processes  for 
their  support  lie  along  the  way  of  the  dis¬ 
cussion  we  have  been  conducting.  The  reply 
is  a  rather  simple  matter.  We  have  not  been 
trying  to  prove  everything,  but  only  to  make 
clear  one  or  two  things.  We  have  endeavored 
to  show  that  it  is  the  very  genius  of  Chris- 


48  SYNTHETIC  CHRISTIANITY 


tianity  to  form  a  synthesis  in  which  elements 
in  many  views  which  have  contended  on  the 
field  of  speculation  have  united  in  a  higher 
unity.  We  have  also  endeavored  to  show  that 
this  synthetic  spirit  opens  the  way  to  a  meet¬ 
ing  place  between  philosophy  as  a  long  ad¬ 
venture  of  analysis  and  interpretation  and 
Christianity  as  a  living  passion.  We  have 
a  suspicion  that  if  these  things  are  true,  Chris¬ 
tianity  is  found  to  occupy  a  position  of  very 
strategic  advantage  and  that  in  the  light  of 
it  many  things  must  be  appraised  with  which 
it  has  not  been  possible  to  deal  in  detail  in  this 
analysis.  In  other  words,  our  only  assump¬ 
tion,  though  it  has  appeared  in  varied  forms, 
has  been  this :  Christianity  has  a  right 
to  speak  according  to  its  own  nature,  and  we 
must  value  the  specific  claims  it  makes  in  the 
light  of  the  fashion  in  which  its  whole  organ¬ 
ism  relates  itself  to  the  deepest  life  of  the  mind 
of  man. 

It  does  not  appear,  then,  to  be  very  far 
from  the  position  we  have  reached  to  that  put 
by  Robert  Browning  in  the  words  of  one  of 
his  characters:  “that  life  that  death  accepted 
by  thy  reason  solves  for  thee  all  questions  in 
the  earth  and  out  of  it.”  Of  that  more  will 
follow.  At  least  this  much  is  sure.  In  Chris¬ 
tianity  we  find  truth  conceived  in  terms  of 


TRIUMPHANT  TRUTH 


49 


inspiration  and  action.  In  Christianity  we 
find  principles  which  organize  the  very  his¬ 
tory  of  philosophy  into  new  meaning  and  re¬ 
veal  in  it  new  unity  and  harmony.  In  Chris¬ 
tianity  thought  and  action  meet  in  the  hour 
of  moral  and  spiritual  victory. 


LECTURE  II 


TRIUMPHANT  GOODNESS 

There  is  scarcely  a  more  delightful  exer¬ 
cise  than  vicarious  repentance.  The  prescrip¬ 
tion  for  this  sort  of  observance  is  simple,  but 
it  must  be  followed  with  careful  attention  to 
each  detail.  First,  you  pick  out  something 
which  you  would  never  be  tempted  to  do. 
Then  you  discover  somebody  who  does  this 
particular  thing  continually.  Then  with  the 
subtlest  flavor  of  complacency  giving  a  deli¬ 
cate  pleasure  to  the  experience  you  repent  of 
the  other  man's  wrongdoing.  You  have  a 
notable  sense  of  moral  elevation  without  any 
sense  of  personal  humiliation.  There  has 
been  a  good  deal  of  vicarious  repentance  in 
contemporary  writing.  A  number  of  our 
clever  and  consciously  able  young  intellec¬ 
tuals  have  recently  been  telling  us  in  sorrow 
embroidered  by  anger  what  is  the  matter  with 
this  Republic.  For  a  long  time  Mr.  H.  L. 
Mencken  has  been  repenting  of  moral  respect¬ 
ability  wherever  he  finds  it.  Ferociously 
earnest  young  radicals  have  been  repenting 

50 


TRIUMPHANT  GOODNESS 


51 


of  our  devotion  to  the  Ten  Commandments. 
Within  the  cages  of  our  stern  moralities  fierce 
young  libertines  have  been  repenting  of  Puri¬ 
tanism  and  all  its  works.  Carried  along  by 
their  noble  enthusiasm,  energetic  intellectuals 
have  done  everything  short  of  the  conducting 
of  revival  meetings  to  convert  us  to  the  prac¬ 
tice  of  ancient  vices  which  we  are  now  to  re¬ 
gard  as  the  super  virtues  of  an  emancipated 
age.  Momentarily  we  may  expect  the  Billy 
Sunday  of  the  movement  to  appear  accom¬ 
panied  by  a  swarming  bevy  of  publicity  ex¬ 
perts  and  preaching  the  gospel  of  license  with 
an  abandon  of  evangelical  fervor. 

All  of  this  at  least  indicates  a  fresh  ap¬ 
proach  to  the  problems  of  life,  and  inasmuch 
as  the  solemnly  brave  young  apostles  of  moral 
anarchy  produce  more  pyrotechnics  in  the 
night  sky  than  power  by  which  the  machinery 
of  life  can  be  kept  moving,  we  need  not  be  too 
much  disturbed  by  them.  All  their  wedlock 
of  literary  distinction  to  moral  madness  is 
just  an  indication  of  the  fashion  in  which  the 
yeast  of  a  new  and  restless  eagerness  is  mov¬ 
ing  through  contemporary  life.  They  are  the 
froth.  But  there  is  a  real  and  deep  movement 
in  the  great  and  far-lying  sea.  Professor 
Sherman  has  been  administering  the  antidote 
at  places  where  an  antidote  was  badly  needed, 


52  SYNTHETIC  CHRISTIANITY 


and  we  may  see  many  a  sign  that  the  older 
sanities  will  be  able  to  maintain  themselves 
in  the  midst  of  the  intellectual  jazz  which 
some  clever  men  please  themselves  by  calling 
thought. 

A  deeper  expression  of  that  restless  desire 
to  brush  away  conventional  distinctions  and 
to  come  to  the  heart  of  reality  itself  is  found 
in  such  writing  as  appears  in  those  anonymous 
volumes  The  Glass  of  Fashion  and  Painted 
Windows  so  persistently  ascribed  to  the  pen 
of  that  versatile  journalist  Harold  Begbie. 
Here  the  ethical  passion  once  more  comes  to 
its  own  and  a  fierce  honesty  unites  with  a 
genuine  moral  enthusiasm.  The  deep  cutting 
sword  into  which  Dean  Inge  has  turned  his 
pen  is  another  example  of  criticism  inspired 
by  deep  and  stable  ethical  conviction.  If 
General  Smuts  is  right  in  saying  that  hu¬ 
manity  is  on  the  march,  there  are  at  least 
those  who  are  reminding  us  that  the  march 
may  have  the  guidance  of  the  pillar  of  cloud 
by  day  and  the  pillar  of  fire  by  night. 

A  world  of  such  seething  unrest  at  least 
provides  a  most  stimulating  place  in  which  to 
attempt  to  think  honestly  and  constructively 
about  the  problems  of  human  life.  In  our  first 
lecture  we  considered  philosophy  rather  as  a 
series  of  theories  of  truth,  and  we  saw  the 


TRIUMPHANT  GOODNESS 


53 


fashion  in  which  Christianity  provides  a  syn¬ 
thesis  of  all  the  noblest  insights  which  have 
come  to  light  during  the  course  of  philosophic 
speculation.  We  could  not  avoid  noticing 
many  a  connection  between  philosophy  as  a 
theory  of  truth  and  the  matters  of  conduct, 
but  it  was  truth  which  was  kept  in  emphasis. 
Now  we  are  to  think  of  the  human  endeavor 
to  answer  the  question  which  probes  deeper 
than  the  question,  “What  is  truth  ?”  namely, 
that  other  question,  “What  is  life?”  To  be 
sure,  the  two  are  inextricably  connected,  but 
we  shall  now  find  a  different  accent  in  our 
thinking  and  we  shall  find  ourselves  moving 
about  with  a  different  series  of  perspectives. 
The  attempt  to  interpret  experience  so  as  to 
discover  the  nature  of  the  good  and  the  method 
by  which  it  may  be  appropriated  is  that  su¬ 
preme  ethical  endeavor  whose  result  is  the 
total  achievement  in  character  in  the  world. 

Broadly  speaking,  two  opposite  conceptions 
of  the  good  of  life  have  been  outstanding  in 
the  history  of  human  thought  and  action.  On 
the  one  hand  there  has  been  the  philosophy  of 
life  as  duty.  On  the  other  there  has  been  the 
philosophy  of  life  as  pleasure.  Virtue  has 
claimed  the  complete  allegiance  of  man.  En¬ 
joyment  has  made  the  same  thoroughgoing 
and  masterful  claim.  By  the  close  of  the 


54  SYNTHETIC  CHRISTIANITY 


fourth  century  before  Christ  the  two  attitudes 
toward  life  confronted  each  other  as  Stoicism 
and  Epicureanism.  The  Greek  mind,  with  its 
characteristic  clarity  and  lucidity  and  its  en¬ 
deavor  to  get  at  the  root  of  things,  had  reached 
these  two  positions  as  the  opposite  poles  of 
thought  and  action.  Out  from  the  two  ways 
of  viewing  life  went  great  streams  of  influence 
upon  the  world.  At  its  best,  Stoicism  pro¬ 
duced  men  who  transcended  national  boun¬ 
daries  in  a  great  and  noble  conception  of  hu¬ 
manity  and  achieved  a  lofty  and  inspiring 
view  of  that  great  movement  of  the  nature  of 
things  which  defines  the  direction  and  mean¬ 
ing  of  all  right-minded  human  conduct.  At 
its  worst,  Stoicism  was  hard  and  angular  and 
self-conscious,  without  generous  human  sym¬ 
pathy  and  without  grace  or  charm.  It  was 
the  apotheosis  of  a  rigid  self-control  from 
which  all  understanding  of  the  loveliness  of 
life  had  passed  away.  At  its  best  Epicurean¬ 
ism  was  a  serene  and  noble  appreciation  of 
the  stable  elements  of  life,  a  quiet  and  urbane 
enjoyment  of  its  permanent  qualities  of  love¬ 
liness.  At  its  worst,  Epicureanism  was  a  sur¬ 
render  to  all  the  lawless  impulses  of  a  gross 
and  unbridled  sensuality.  It  was  the  apoth¬ 
eosis  of  lawless  passion. 

If  we  watch  these  two  impulses  playing 


TRIUMPHANT  GOODNESS 


55 


upon  the  world  with  all  the  fine  contribution 
to  its  life  and  all  the  devastation  of  beauty  on 
the  one  hand  and  of  virtue  on  the  other  which 
has  lain  at  the  heart  of  a  one-sided  emphasis 
of  either  of  them,  the  thought  is  sure  to  occur 
to  us  that  each  has  its  gifts  to  make  to  the 
life  of  man  and  that  each  needs  to  be  supple¬ 
mented  by  the  other.  It  was  a  notable  day 
when  on  the  Areopagus  at  Athens,  Paul  con¬ 
fronted  the  representatives  of  these  two  views 
of  life.  For  though  Paul’s  thought  was  not 
moving  along  these  channels,  we  can  see  that 
the  thesis  and  antithesis  met  that  day  in  a 
higher  unity  which  included  the  elements  of 
truth  to  which  each  bore  witness. 

The  insistence  upon  righteousness  in  the 
prophets  of  the  Old  Testament  moves  in  the 
same  mental  and  moral  realm  as  the  ethical 
passion  of  Stoicism.  One  represents  the  voice 
of  conscience  speaking  Greek.  The  other  rep¬ 
resents  the  voice  of  conscience  speaking 
Hebrew.  The  prophets  made  compelling  to 
Israel  the  sense  of  a  set  of  absolute  standards 
to  which  men  must  conform  and  by  which  they 
would  be  judged.  They  filled  the  moral  de¬ 
mand  with  such  fire  and  passion  as  it  never 
developed  among  the  Greeks.  In  fact,  had  it 
been  possible  to  set  Stoicism  on  fire,  you 
would  have  had  something  not  unlike  Hebrew 


56  SYNTHETIC  CHRISTIANITY 


prophecy.  Amos,  who  turned  conscience  into 
a  sword,  is  typical  of  that  royal  race  of  men 
whose  lips  were  edged  with  lightning  and 
whose  words  reverberated  like  thunder  in  the 
minds  of  men.  But  even  in  the  Old  Testament 
prophecy  becomes  something  more  than  an  in¬ 
carnate  “ought,”  There  is  a  famous  passage 
in  Micah  where  a  new  note  of  moral  and 
spiritual  gentleness  is  heard  amidst  the  artil¬ 
lery  of  the  prophets’  battle.  And  when  we 
come  to  the  New  Testament,  “I  ought”  is 
transfigured  as  it  changes  into  “I  love.”  It 
is  the  glory  of  Christianity  that  it  turns  moral 
obligation  into  spiritual  delight.  It  turns 
duty  into  pleasure.  It  makes  us  love  the 
things  which  we  ought  to  do.  Duty  and  en¬ 
joyment,  virtue  and  pleasure  are  wedded  in 
that  glorious  and  lyrical  outburst  which  we 
find  in  the  thirteenth  chapter  of  First  Corin¬ 
thians.  No  wonder  that  it  inspired  Professor 
Henry  Drummond  to  write  his  little  classic  on 
love  as  the  greatest  thing  in  the  world.  So 
it  is  that  even  as  law  and  prophecy  are  met 
and  transcended  in  Christianity  even  so  Stoi¬ 
cism  and  Epicureanism  meet  at  their  best  in 
the  experience  of  the  Christian  life.  The 
moral  passion  of  Stoicism  is  saved  and  its 
hard  angularities  are  cast  off.  The  hearty 
spontaneousness  of  Epicureanism  and  its 


TRIUMPHANT  GOODNESS 


57 


frank  gladness  are  saved,  and  its  tendency  to 
descend  into  grossness  and  evil  indulgence  is 
transcended  by  a  passion  for  goodness  which 
makes  it  impossible  to  enjoy  evil  things. 

To  be  sure,  particular  Christian  groups  and 
individuals  have  not  always  realized  the 
meaning  and  strategy  of  this  synthesis  of  duty 
and  pleasure.  There  were  high  ecclesiastics 
of  the  Renaissance  who  preserved  the  mood  of 
the  epicure  without  the  moral  passion  of  the 
prophet,  and  so  they  reverted  to  that  licen¬ 
tiousness  from  which  Epicureanism  has  al¬ 
ways  been  striving  to  rise.  There  were  Puritan 
leaders  of  the  seventeenth  and  eighteenth  cen¬ 
turies  who  preserved  all  the  Stoic  passion  for 
virtue  and  who  had  quite  lost  sight  of  the 
beauty  of  holiness.  And  in  this  fashion  they 
reverted  to  the  hard  and  rigid  and  self-con¬ 
scious  qualities  with  which  Stoicism  has  had 
always  to  contend.  But  when  the  full  wit¬ 
ness  of  Christianity  has  been  heard,  it  has 
expressed  virtue  in  terms  of  gladness  and  has 
reconciled  pleasure  and  moral  passion.  Even 
self-sacrifice  when  it  is  completely  Christian 
is  so  glorified  by  love  that  the  person  making 
the  supreme  offering  is  often  scarcely  con¬ 
scious  of  the  cost.  His  gift  of  himself  seems 
a  perfectly  obvious  thing  And  he  is  trium¬ 
phantly  glad  as  he  makes  the  gift. 


58  SYNTHETIC  CHRISTIANITY 


At  this  point  it  is  important  to  observe  that 
a  part  of  the  strategy  of  the  Christian  religion 
is  its  perpetual  lifting  of  men  to  a  higher  level 
of  enjoyment.  You  know  a  great  deal  about 
a  man  if  you  know  what  he  means  when  he 
says  that  he  has  had  a  good  time.  He  may 
mean  that  he  has  been  eating  an  appetizing 
dinner.  He  may  mean  that  he  has  been  sail¬ 
ing  a  boat.  He  may  mean  that  he  has  been  in¬ 
dulging  in  the  gratification  of  some  wild  and 
hectic  desire.  He  may  mean  that  he  has  been 
busy  about  some  great  human  task.  He  may 
mean  that  he  has  been  enjoying  a  noble  poem. 
He  may  mean  that  he  has  been  solving  a  prob¬ 
lem  of  mathematics.  He  may  mean  that  he 
has  been  pursuing  some  high  path  of  philo¬ 
sophical  dialectic.  It  is  fair  to  believe  that 
Charlie  Chaplin  as  we  see  him  in  one  of  his 
comedies  and  Sir  Henry  Jones  as  we  sense  the 
quality  of  his  personality  in  that  closely 
reasoned  volume  A  Faith  That  Enquires 
represent  different  standards  of  enjoyment. 
Christianity  is  perpetually  opening  new  paths 
of  noble  enjoyment  to  men,  and  it  is  all  the 
while  so  refining  their  capacity  and  their 
taste  that  they  are  able  to  enter  into  posses¬ 
sion  of  ever  more  wonderful  promised  lands. 
It  is  not  that  Christianity  decreases  men’s 
power  to  participate  in  simple  and  homely 


TRIUMPHANT  GOODNESS 


59 


enjoyments.  Indeed,  the  enthusiasm  for  the 
artificial  and  the  bizarre  is  in  its  own  way 
an  indication  of  the  fact  that  we  are  moving 
away  from  the  genius  of  the  Christian  re¬ 
ligion.  But  without  robbing  men  of  the  fine 
and  homely  simplicities,  Christianity  is  all 
the  while  making  them  ready  for  loftier  and 
more  subtly  distilled  gladness.  It  is  all  the 
while  making  their  pleasures  more  ethical.  It 
is  all  the  while  making  their  pleasures  more 
spiritual.  It  is  all  the  while  building  a  gran¬ 
ite  edifice  of  goodness  and  then  making  the 
loveliest  of  vines  to  clamber  all  about  it  and 
the  rarest  of  flowers  to  hang  upon  its  walls. 
Duty  at  its  most  commanding  and  pleasure  at 
its  loftiest  moment  are  united  in  a  noble  har¬ 
mony  in  the  Christian  faith. 

There  is  another  contrast  which  is  inherent 
in  the  moral  process  itself  and  which  emerges 
in  different  fashions  in  the  ethical  experience 
of  man.  This  has  to  do  with  the  philosophy 
of  goodness  as  conduct  and  the  philosophy  of 
goodness  as  a  life  of  the  motives  in  the  soul 
of  man.  In  one  way  you  have  a  typical  mind 
with  the  emphasis  on  the  outer  in  the  phil¬ 
osophy  of  Aristotle,  though  in  Aristotle  this 
is  a  matter  of  emphasis  rather  than  a  lack  of 
recognition  of  the  place  of  the  inner  life  in 
the  experience  of  man.  In  Plotinus  you  have 


60  SYNTHETIC  CHRISTIANITY 


such  an  emphasis  on  the  inner  that  both 
thought  and  conduct  may  seem  to  be  entirely 
transcended  in  the  rapturous  apprehension 
of  the  ultimate  reality  by  the  spirit  of  man 
which  Plotinus  feels  to  be  the  ultimate  good 
of  humanity.  One  attitude  toward  life  is  ex¬ 
pressed  in  the  words  of  Matthew  Arnold — 
“Conduct  is  three  fourths  of  life.”  The  other 
is  at  least  suggested  in  the  familiar  words  of 
Ralph  Waldo  Emerson — “What  you  are  speaks 
so  loud  that  I  cannot  hear  what  you  say.” 

There  is  much  to  be  said  for  each  position. 
It  is  easy  to  see  how  inevitable  it  is  that  the 
statesman  and  the  practical  moralist  should 
emphasize  matters  of  conduct.  Good  will  which 
is  not  crystallized  into  concrete  diplomatic  ac¬ 
tion  never  prevents  wars.  The  enthusiasm  for 
a  peaceful  world  must  take  solid  and  tangible 
form  if  we  are  to  have  sanctions  strong 
enough  to  hold  the  nations  steady  in  the  hours 
of  stress  and  strain.  The  most  gentle  and 
kindly  spirit  on  the  part  of  a  captain  of  indus¬ 
try  is  curiously  ineffective  if  the  methods  used 
in  the  industrial  organizations  which  he  con¬ 
trols  are  all  the  while  depleting  the  vitality 
of  the  workers,  making  for  poverty  and 
fomenting  unrest.  A  man  may  be  a  good 
citizen  at  heart,  but  he  must  get  his  attitude 
expressed  at  the  ballot  if  he  is  to  make  his 


TRIUMPHANT  GOODNESS 


61 


position  influential  in  the  life  of  a  municipal¬ 
ity  or  a  commonwealth  or  a  nation  where  the 
political  form  is  that  of  a  democracy.  The 
fine  spirit  which  never  gets  itself  expressed  in 
action  has  a  curious  futility  in  the  midst  of 
ail  the  heaving  and  throbbing  activities  of 
men. 

On  the  other  hand,  it  is  not  hard  to  see  how 
empty  are  all  external  actions  which  do  not 
have  the  soul  of  reality  behind  them.  The 
very  genesis  of  blue  laws  is  the  putting  upon 
the  legislative  records  enactments  which  do 
not  express  the  inner  insights  and  the  inner 
convictions  of  the  people.  The  soul  of  a 
nation  must  be  back  of  a  law  if  that  law  is 
actually  to  be  enforced.  Then  once  and  again 
we  have  met  the  phenomena  of  good  deeds 
which  were  for  public  consumption  only. 
They  did  not  express  the  intention  of  the  doer. 
They  did  not  represent  the  spirit  of  the  man 
who  was  responsible  for  them.  They  were  a 
shrewd  appeal  for  the  good  will  of  the  public. 
They  stood  not  for  what  the  man  was,  nor 
for  what  he  desired  to  be,  but  for  what  he 
desired  people  to  think  he  was.  Very  often 
good  deeds  have  been  the  mask  of  an  evil 
character.  Sometimes  they  have  been  a  smoke 
barrage  to  cover  a  subtle  attack  upon  the  good¬ 
ness  of  the  world. 


62  SYNTHETIC  CHRISTIANITY 


The  peril  of  the  tremendous  emphasis  upon 
publicity  in  our  own  time  lies  partly  at  this 
point.  For  at  one  stage  publicity  consists  in 
getting  people  to  think  that  a  thing  is  true. 
And  this  may  be  done  quite  apart  from  the 
facts  in  the  case.  It  is  easy  for  men  who  are 
ready  to  take  moral  shortcuts — and  there  are 
always  many  of  such  men  in  the  world — to 
refuse  to  take  the  trouble  to  square  the  facts 
with  the  moral  demands  of  the  situation  if 
they  can  meet  the  immediate  requirements  by 
persuading  the  public  that  the  facts  are  as  the 
public  would  like  to  have  them  be. 

There  is  an  even  subtler  danger  in  the 
philosophy  of  goodness  as  a  matter  belonging 
to  the  outer  life  when  it  is  upheld  apart  from 
the  fuller  knowledge  of  all  that  must  go  to 
make  a  deed  good.  This  arises  from  the  fact 
that  a  good  deed  coming  from  a  wrong  or 
inadequate  motive  may  be  so  hard  and  un¬ 
lovely  that  it  loses  all  moral  and  spiritual 
power.  There  have  been  plenty  of  stepmothers 
who  were  real  mothers  of  profound  affection, 
but  the  old  distinction  between  a  stepmother 
doing  rightly  by  the  children  in  a  home  from  a 
sense  of  obligation  and  the  actual  mother 
doing  the  same  things  with  a  heart  overflow¬ 
ing  with  unselfish  devotion  does  illustrate 
what  we  mean.  You  cannot  get  a  perfect  deed 


TRIUMPHANT  GOODNESS 


63 


until  the  inner  life  is  glowing  with  the  rap¬ 
ture  of  it. 

The  fact  is  that  the  moment  we  attempt  to 
make  an  analysis  of  the  elements  in  a  deed 
which  is  really  good  we  must  transcend  the 
one-sided  emphasis  on  the  outer  and  the  one¬ 
sided  emphasis  on  the  inner.  A  good  deed 
must  get  clearly  in  action  that  which  is  noble 
and  true.  And  a  good  deed  has  as  a  central 
element  in  its  constitution  a  spirit  full  of  the 
inner  strength  of  loyalty  to  goodness.  And 
a  good  deed  becomes  as  nearly  perfect  as  any¬ 
thing  in  this  human  world  can  be  when  back 
of  its  fine  adequacy  on  the  field  of  action  and 
the  loyal  will  which  propels  it  there  is  a  heart 
of  rapturous  love  of  goodness  filling  the  deed 
with  the  subtle  beauty  and  fragrance  of  its 
rare  bloom  in  the  inner  life  of  the  spirit. 
Goodness  is  expressed  in  what  we  do.  It 
includes  what  we  mean  by  what  we  do.  And 
at  its  highest  it  is  set  to  the  music  of  a  pas¬ 
sion  which  sings  unceasingly  in  the  soul  of 
the  man  to  whom  the  good  has  become  a  living 
inspiration.  Now,  the  moment  we  examine 
Christianity  in  the  light  of  this  discussion,  we 
are  fairly  surprised  to  find  in  what  a  thorough 
fashion  it  provides  the  synthesis  which  unites 
every  element  of  good  in  the  philosophy  of 
conduct  and  the  philosophy  of  motives.  No 


64  SYNTHETIC  CHRISTIANITY 


one  ever  spoke  more  searching  words  regard¬ 
ing  the  inner  life  than  did  Jesus.  He  drew 
the  contrast  between  the  outer  and  the  inner 
with  a  power  which  the  world  can  never  for¬ 
get.  His  picture  of  whitened  sepulchers  full 
of  dead  men’s  bones  to  describe  a  life  fair 
without  and  loathsome  within,  goes  to  the 
very  heart  of  the  matter  and  presents  it  in  a 
picture  which  fastens  itself  upon  the  mind. 
The  utterance  which  we  often  describe  as  the 
Sermon  on  the  Mount  has  as  one  of  its  funda¬ 
mental  movements  this  taking  men  from  the 
outer  and  fastening  their  eyes  upon  the  inner. 
The  man  who  prays  upon  the  street  corner  but 
has  no  corner  for  prayer  in  his  heart  is  held 
up  to  scorn.  The  man  who  gives  lavishly  in 
public  but  has  no  love  of  giving  for  its  own 
sake  in  his  heart  is  exhibited  in  all  the  crass 
externalism  of  his  life.  The  searchlight  of 
Jesus  penetrates  the  last  recesses  of  men’s 
souls  and  finds  in  its  final  lair  the  true  motive 
which  is  back  of  the  deed.  Jesus  delivered 
ethics  from  dependence  upon  the  visible  and 
set  up  the  moral  tribunal  in  the  invisible 
recesses  of  the  heart.  But  while  all  this  is 
true  the  same  mighty  Master  of  the  art  and 
practice  of  living  put  a  tremendous  emphasis 
upon  conduct.  “Why  call  ye  me,  Lord,  Lord, 
and  do  not  the  things  which  I  say?”  “If  ye 


TRIUMPHANT  GOODNESS 


65 


love  me,  keep  my  commandments.”  “If  ye 
keep  my  commandments,  ye  shall  abide  in  my 
love.”  “He  that  heareth  these  sayings  of 
mine  and  doeth  them  is  like  a  man  whose 
house  was  builded  upon  a  rock.”  “He  that 
willeth  to  do  shall  know.”  So  runs  the  mar¬ 
velous  refrain  of  great  utterances  whose  con¬ 
summation  is  action.  The  philosophy  of  good¬ 
ness  as  a  life  of  the  motives  which  dwell  in  the 
heart  and  the  philosophy  of  goodness  as  a  life 
of  action  met  and  found  perfect  harmony  in 
the  higher  unity  of  the  teaching  of  J esus. 

It  is  in  the  Christian  religion,  too,  that  the 
difference  between  goodness  as  loyalty  and 
goodness  as  love  is  perfectly  appraised,  and 
the  loyalty  is  caught  up  and  transfigured  in 
the  higher  devotion.  This  point  has  such  far- 
reaching  elements  of  importance  that  it 
deserves  more  than  a  passing  attention.  Per¬ 
haps  we  can  best  approach  the  matter  by  a 
study  of  Falstaff  in  the  days  when  the  reck¬ 
less  and  carefree  Prince  Hal  was  his  boon 
companion  and  the  same  Prince  Hal  when 
high  responsibility  has  made  him  into  a  seri¬ 
ous  king  who  has  no  time  for  lawless  vaga¬ 
bonds.  The  curious  thing  about  such  a  study 
is  just  that  we  are  forced  to  admit  that  the 
moral  vagabond  Falstaff  is  much  more  to  our 
liking  than  the  serious  king  and  that  Prince 


66  SYNTHETIC  CHRISTIANITY 


Hal  himself  is  a  much  more  attractive  human 
being  when  he  is  a  careless  young  Bohemian 
than  when  as  a  dignified  king  he  rebuffs  his 
one-time  comrade.  The  more  we  analyze  the 
situation,  the  more  perplexing  it  becomes. 
For  most  of  us  can  think  of  people  who  were 
more  attractive  in  their  days  of  careless  good 
fellowship  than  after  they  had  come  to  moral 
decision  and  had  attained  ethical  maturity. 
We  begin  to  wonder  if  there  is  something 
wrong  with  the  structure  of  things.  Is  a 
man  really  more  lovable  when  he  has  no  moral 
purpose  than  when  he  is  mastered  by  a  great 
ethical  loyalty?  The  problem  which  we  raise 
in  this  fashion  is  not  so  difficult  of  solution 
if  we  follow  the  moral  process  all  the  way 
through.  You  can  never  judge  an  apple  tree 
by  the  hard  and  juiceless  apples  in  one  stage 
of  development.  You  must  wait  until  the 
apples  ripen  if  you  are  going  to  judge  fairly 
the  fruit  of  the  tree.  It  is  so  with  moral  pur¬ 
pose.  The  vagabond  is  not  attractive  because 
he  has  parted  company  with  his  conscience. 
He  is  attractive  because  there  is  something 
wonderfully  spontaneous  about  his  life.  A 
virtuous  man  in  the  green-apple  stage  of  his 
development  is  not  unattractive  because  he  is 
in  earnest.  He  is  unattractive  because  he  is 
hard  and  self-conscious.  There  is  something 


TRIUMPHANT  GOODNESS 


67 


mathematical  about  his  loyalty.  He  is  always 
remembering  the  formula.  There  is  no  splen¬ 
dor  of  creative  freedom  about  his  life.  Now, 
the  wonderful  thing  about  the  man  who  has 
taken  the  whole  moral  journey  and  whose 
goodness  is  transfigured  in  the  joyous  devo¬ 
tion  which  Christianity  gives  is  just  the  fact 
that  he  has  won  back  all  the  glad  spontane¬ 
ousness  which  at  one  stage  of  his  moral 
growth  he  seemed  so  entirely  to  have  lost.  He 
has  parted  company  with  self-consciousness. 
He  is  not  all  the  time  thinking  of  the  book  of 
rules.  The  law  of  God  is  written  on  his  heart 
and  he  does  the  thing  which  is  good  because 
he  loves  to  do  it.  He  has  all  the  zest  of  Fal- 
staff  and  all  the  earnestness  of  a  Hebrew 
prophet.  It  is  just  this  secret  of  Christianity 
which  it  must  be  confessed  many  professing 
Christians  have  missed.  And  it  is  just  this 
secret  which  many  critics  of  Christianity  have 
never  understood  at  all.  A  good  many  of  our 
hot-headed  young  intellectuals  who  think  that 
you  have  to  break  one  of  the  Ten  Command¬ 
ments  to  prove  that  you  have  any  creative 
freedom  in  your  life  are  unconsciously  long¬ 
ing  for  that  goal  of  Christian  goodness  where 
righteousness  as  a  command  is  transcended  by 
righteousness  as  a  living  passion.  The  man  at 
this  higher  place  in  the  journey  of  moral 


68  SYNTHETIC  CHRISTIANITY 


experience  often  does  the  same  things  which 
are  done  by  the  man  at  the  lower  stage  of  the 
journey.  But  he  does  them  with  a  different 
motive.  He  does  them  with  a  new  enthusiasm. 
He  does  them  with  a  splendid  and  creative 
joy.  The  romance  of  Vagabondia  is  lost  in 
the  earlier  stages  of  the  moral  pilgrimage,  but 
it  is  found  again  all  transfigured  and  glori¬ 
fied  upon  the  uplands  of  sainthood.  And  as 
we  study  the  process  intelligently  we  begin 
to  have  very  deep  suspicions  that  the  creative 
spirit  at  the  heart  of  goodness  is  ready  to  come 
to  most  of  us  far  sooner  than  we  are  ready  to 
welcome  its  bright  and  glowing  ministry. 

So  the  outer  and  the  inner  meet  and  blend 
in  the  Christian  experience  of  the  ethical  life. 
And  so  both  are  changed  from  the  driven 
obedience  of  ethical  slaves  to  the  glad  and 
spontaneous  freedom  of  a  morally  and  spiritu¬ 
ally  creative  life.  This  is  what  Paul  means 
when  he  talks  of  being  no  more  a  bond  servant 
but  a  son  and  heir.  Paul  had  taken  the  whole 
journey,  and  he  knew  its  every  vicissitude  and 
all  the  wonder  of  its  ultimate  triumphs.  The 
man  who  wrote  the  amazing  outburst  regard¬ 
ing  the  glory  of  the  divine  love  knew  secrets 
which  many  dull  and  blase  critics  of  Chris¬ 
tian  morals  have  never  sighted  even  from  a 
far  distance.  The  green-apple  stage  of  moral 


TRIUMPHANT  GOODNESS 


69 


development  lies  far  behind.  We  are  now  in 
the  presence  of  the  ripe  and  luscious  fruit. 
“Nay,  in  all  these  things  we  are  more  than 
conquerors  through  him  that  loved  us.  For 
I  am  persuaded,  that  neither  death,  nor  life, 
nor  angels,  nor  principalities,  nor  things  pres¬ 
ent,  nor  things  to  come,  nor  powers,  nor 
height,  nor  depth,  nor  any  other  creature, 
shall  be  able  to  separate  us  from  the  love  of 
God,  which  is  in  Christ  Jesus  our  Lord.” 

The  theory  and  the  practice  of  life  have 
been  built  about  the  opposing  sanctions  of 
another  set  of  principles.  There  have  been 
those  who  have  found  the  good  of  life  essen¬ 
tially  in  self  assertion.  There  have  been  those 
who  have  found  the  good  of  life  essentially  in 
self-denial.  Whole  civilizations  have  felt  the 
impulses  and  the  inhibitions  coming  from 
these  opposing  attitudes  toward  the  nature 
of  what  is  really  good.  The  most  dramatic 
and  brilliant  apostle  of  the  ethics  of  self- 
assertion  was  Frederick  Nietzsche.  He  was 
one  of  the  few  men  who  have  been  ready  to 
carry  a  theory  to  the  remorseless  end  of  its 
logical  implications.  He  found  in  the  asser¬ 
tive  and  masterful  and  imperial  will  the 
supreme  good  of  life.  The  will  to  power,  the 
will  to  conquer,  the  will  to  subdue — these  gave 
life  its  true  virility,  its  only  permanently  crea- 


70  SYNTHETIC  CHRISTIANITY 


tive  zest.  Any  other  view  represented  a  deca¬ 
dent  and  diseased  slave  morality,  a  subtle 
endeavor  of  the  weak  by  a  system  of  ethics 
which  they  adroitly  created  to  make  a  place 
for  themselves  in  a  world  which  belonged  to 
the  strong.  The  only  safety  of  civilization  lay 
in  a  fierce  strength.  An  unscrupulous  vigor 
of  mind  and  will  which  swept  everything  be¬ 
fore  the  passion  and  the  power  of  its  own 
triumphant  virility  was  the  hope  of  the  world. 
The  consummation  of  the  whole  process  of 
biological  evolution  was  the  superman  who 
could  impose  his  own  mighty  will  upon  a 
world  whose  finest  and  fiercest  product  he 
was.  Darwin  had  seen  a  little  of  the  meaning 
of  the  struggle  for  existence  and  the  survival 
of  the  fittest.  Nietzsche  believed  that  he  had 
visualized  the  whole  process  and  was  able  to 
express  its  deep  and  ultimate  meaning.  Self- 
assertion  on  the  part  of  the  strong  was  the 
very  central  meaning  of  life.  It  was  the  first 
and  the  last  word  in  the  meaning  of  conduct. 

It  is  easy  to  see  what  an  appeal  such  a 
philosophy  of  life  would  make  to  hot  and 
impetuous  young  men  impatient  of  compro¬ 
mise  and  with  the  vital  tides  of  life  sweep¬ 
ing  powerfully  through  their  whole  person¬ 
ality.  Here  was  an  interpretation  which 
with  terrible  courage  faced  every  fact  and 


TRIUMPHANT  GOODNESS 


71 


called  every  actual  element  in  experience  by 
its  right  name.  It  was  brave  enough  to  be 
cruel  and  free  enough  to  brush  scruples  away 
if  they  stood  in  the  road  of  that  triumphant 
achievement  of  assertive  and  conquering  will 
which  was  the  very  essence  of  life.  There 
were  multitudes  of  powerful  young  intellec¬ 
tuals  in  Europe  who  felt  that  now  at  last  the 
word  of  ultimate  vitality  had  been  spoken. 
Now  the  strong  man  had  found  an  ethic 
worthy  of  his  strength.  Now  the  man  of  im¬ 
perial  will  had  found  a  philosophy  which 
answered  to  his  own  power. 

Over  against  the  philosophy  of  self-asser¬ 
tion  stood  a  very  ancient  and  venerable  system 
of  ethical  beliefs  which  centered  about  the 
idea  of  self-control  and  self-denial  as  the 
method  by  which  the  ultimate  good  of  life  was 
to  be  achieved.  For  centuries  deeply  medita¬ 
tive  thinkers  in  India  had  been  insisting  that 
the  repudiation  of  the  world,  and  not  the  ac¬ 
ceptance  of  the  world,  was  the  ultimate  good. 
Not  a  rapturous  and  remorseless  assertion  of 
the  will  to  live  and  the  will  to  conquer,  but 
a  denial  of  the  will  to  live,  a  thrusting  out  of 
the  will  to  conquer,  was  of  the  very  essence 
of  the  life  of  the  seer  and  the  saint.  The 
serene  and  lovely  beauty  of  the  soul  delivered 
from  all  the  passion  of  desire,  even  the  desire 


72  SYNTHETIC  CHRISTIANITY 


for  life  itself,  was  the  good  toward  which  all 
understanding  minds  desired  to  move.  Cen¬ 
turies  of  brooding  quiet  when  thinker  after 
thinker  and  seer  after  seer  traveled  the  dim 
and  silent  ways  of  profound  and  self-denying 
thought  had  left  their  impress  upon  the  very 
atmosphere  of  India  itself.  The  sense  of  that 
ultimate  reality  in  which  all  the  sharp  and 
bitter  assertiveness  of  the  individual  spirit 
would  be  transcended,  of  that  glorious  and 
serene  Nirvana  in  which  the  destructive  and 
disintegrating  bitterness  of  the  individual  will 
would  be  forever  lost,  was  subtly  distilled  in 
the  very  deepest  places  of  the  consciousness 
of  this  gifted  and  reflective  people.  The  pas¬ 
sive  here  at  last  came  to  its  own.  The  active 
found  its  ultimate  repudiation. 

Whatever  the  individual  views  of  a  thinker 
and  writer  who  owns  India  as  his  land  and 
its  deepest  brooding  thought  as  his  inspira¬ 
tion,  one  finds  all  the  while  emerging  a  cer¬ 
tain  lofty  disdain  for  civilizations  based  upon 
the  assertive  will  and  the  personality  which 
goes  about  the  fiercely  achieving  ways  of 
action.  Many  an  American  remembers  the 
chaste  and  faultless  English,  the  subtle  and 
powerful  periods,  the  sword  thrust  of  remorse¬ 
less  irony  with  which  Rabindranath  Tagore 
weighed  our  modern  civilization,  and  all  its 


TRIUMPHANT  GOODNESS 


73 


buzzing  mechanism  and  all  its  superficial 
activity,  and  found  it  wanting,  standing  like 
some  ancient  prophet  and  out  of  the  classic 
richness  of  his  mind  and  the  deep  and  brood¬ 
ing  insight  of  his  heart  pouring  his  high  dis¬ 
dain  of  pretty  much  everything  which  the 
contemporary  man  of  the  Western  world  has 
learned  to  love. 

In  these  two  opposing  types  of  philosophy 
we  may  well  seem  to  have  found  an  ultimate 
antagonism  which  can  never  be  resolved  into 
a  higher  unity.  Grim  and  terrible  in  their 
final  contradiction,  the  philosophy  of  self- 
assertion  and  the  philosophy  of  self-denial 
may  seem  to  confront  each  other  the  ultimate 
rivals  for  the  possession  of  the  mind  and  con¬ 
science  and  heart  of  man. 

But  the  moment  we  begin  to  think  in  the 
mood  of  close  and  clear  analysis  we  begin  to 
see  that  each  of  these  views  alone  is,  when 
carried  to  its  ultimate  conclusion,  the  guide 
to  a  position  which  is  impossible  in  a  world 
which  is  to  continue  to  live  and  grow.  Self- 
assertion  alone  would  destroy  the  world  by 
the  sheer  impact  of  its  hard  and  sordid  self¬ 
ishness.  Self-repression  alone  would  destroy 
civilization  by  the  utter  lassitude  of  that  pas¬ 
siveness  which  it  would  create  in  the  minds 
of  men.  Each  position,  when  taken  as  the 


T4  SYNTHETIC  CHRISTIANITY 


one  good  custom,  does  indeed  promise  to  end 
by  corrupting  the  world.  The  cruel  monsters 
created  by  the  will  to  power  would  turn 
against  each  other  upon  the  ever  smaller  areas 
of  a  world  whose  life  would  be  perpetually 
depleted  by  their  perpetual  strife,  and  at  last 
nothing  would  be  left  but  the  final  sword 
thrusts  of  the  final  antagonists  in  a  world 
where  all  the  fair  and  lovely  things  of  art  and 
life  would  have  been  buried  somewhere  along 
the  path  of  the  lonely  and  titanic  will  to 
power.  The  passive  somnolent  creatures  cre¬ 
ated  in  a  world  which  really  surrendered  to 
the  philosophy  of  the  denial  of  every  impulse 
to  action  and  vigorous  achievement  would 
waste  away  in  the  stern  lands  where  men  must 
work  in  order  that  they  may  secure  their  daily 
bread,  and  in  the  tropics  they  would  live  on 
for  a  while,  dreamy  and  heavy  lotus  eaters, 
lost  in  the  vague  and  evasive  fantasies  of  their 
own  half-slumbering  minds  until  the  will  to 
live  at  last  vanished  and  only  fierce  tropical 
creatures  remained  to  move  about  the  hot 
jungles  where  man’s  life  had  worn  out  in  final 
ennui. 

Now,  it  seems  clear  that  we  cannot  surren¬ 
der  to  either  of  these  interpretations  of  life 
pushed  to  the  extreme  of  its  own  logic.  And 
it  seems  equally  clear  that  when  once  we  allow 


TRIUMPHANT  GOODNESS 


75 


them  to  play  into  each  other,  checking  and 
interpreting  each  other  and  finding  a  higher 
unity  in  a  point  of  view  which  includes  that 
which  is  really  productive  in  each  of  them, 
we  begin  to  find  a  fashion  in  which  life  may 
be  made  really  full  and  rich  and  noble.  The 
impulse  toward  self-assertion,  the  will  to 
achievement,  the  desire  to  bend  the  forces  of 
this  mysterious  world  to  the  purpose  of  man 
is  really  responsible  for  some  of  the  noblest 
and  some  of  the  finest  achievements  of  civil¬ 
ization.  And,  on  the  other  hand,  the  refusal 
to  regard  the  rewards  of  action  in  the  intense 
pursuit  of  the  purposes  of  the  aspiring  will  as 
the  ultimate  things  of  life,  the  preservation  of 
the  mood  of  deep  analysis  and  understanding 
contemplation  in  the  world  of  action  have 
brought  a  depth  and  a  fullness  to  the  spirit 
of  man  to  which  too  eager  a  tribute  can 
scarcely  be  paid.  The  truth  is  that  a  man 
cannot  be  the  greatest  sort  of  man  of  action 
unless  part  of  the  time  he  is  a  spectator.  And 
he  cannot  be  the  best  sort  of  brooding  spec¬ 
tator  unless  part  of  the  time  he  is  a  man  of 
action.  It  is  self-assertion  and  self-repression 
which  together  make  up  a  harmonious  char¬ 
acter.  It  is  thought  and  action  which  together 
make  up  a  good  life.  It  is  the  will  to  achieve 
and  the  capacity  for  a  noble  passiveness  which 


76  SYNTHETIC  CHRISTIANITY 


together  round  out  the  full  circuit  of  the  life 
of  the  world. 

But,  farther  than  this,  as  we  proceed  with 
a  really  searching  analysis,  we  discover  that 
at  its  best  the  ethics  of  self-denial  become  the 
basis  of  a  noble  philosophy  of  action.  Some 
of  the  most  brilliant  achievements  in  the  realm 
of  action  have  had  a  heart  of  self-denial  at 
the  center  of  all  their  quality.  The  will  to 
conquer  may  be  transformed  into  the  will  to 
conquer  self.  The  will  to  power  may  be  made 
into  the  will  to  power  over  self.  The  mighty 
motive  of  self-assertion  may  be  bent  to  the 
purpose  of  the  good  of  society  instead  of  being 
the  slave  of  the  exploiter  of  society.  The 
ethics  of  self-assertion  and  the  ethics  of  self- 
denial  may  find  a  higher  unity  in  the  ethics 
of  altruism  where  men  become  the  most  them¬ 
selves  by  being  the  most  to  others,  where  they 
find  their  lives  again  when  they  lose  them¬ 
selves  in  unselfish  service. 

The  very  moment  when  we  reach  the  series 
of  insights  which  we  have  just  been  trying  to 
express  it  suddenly  dawns  upon  us  that  by  its 
very  nature  Christianity  represents  this  syn¬ 
thesis  of  the  best  in  the  will  of  assertion  and 
the  best  of  the  will  of  denial  united  in  an  un¬ 
selfish  purpose  to  serve  all  human  life. 
Whose  life  was  it  which  was  one  per- 


TRIUMPHANT  GOODNESS 


77 


petual  assertion  of  the  privilege  and  joy  of 
self-giving?  Who  was  it  who  tilled  self-sacri¬ 
fice  with  such  noble  and  joyous  passion  that 
it  became  a  positive  and  productive  thing  in¬ 
stead  of  a  dull  passiveness,  depleting  the  life 
of  all  true  vitality?  Who  was  it  who  in  one 
last  great  act,  which  was  at  once  self-assertion 
and  self-denial,  gave  his  life  for  the  sake  of 
the  world  which  he  loved?  Who  was  it  who 
at  the  very  moment  when  he  refused  to  become 
the  slave  of  the  world,  appreciated  and  util¬ 
ized  a  thousand  good  and  noble  elements  in 
its  life,  loving  the  flowers,  glad  in  the  presence 
of  little  children,  and  believing  in  some  soul 
of  goodness  in  the  heart  of  man  which  would 
respond  to  his  great  gift  of  himself?  The 
truth  is,  of  course,  that  there  never  has  been 
such  a  combination  of  glorious  self-assertion 
and  of  marvelous  self-denial  as  we  find  in  the 
life  and  ministry  and  death  of  Jesus.  He  gave 
the  active  all  the  glory  of  the  passive.  He 
enriched  the  passive  with  all  the  kindling 
quality  of  the  active.  In  him  the  East  and  the 
West  met  in  the  wonder  of  a  wedlock  where 
the  deepest  meaning  of  the  life  of  each  was 
nobly  conserved.  He  is  the  supreme  challenge 
to  men  of  thought.  He  is  the  supreme  inspira¬ 
tion  to  men  of  action.  He  reveals  anew  the 
wonder  of  a  wise  passiveness.  He  shows  forth 


78  SYNTHETIC  CHRISTIANITY 


the  power  of  action  which  has  the  insight  of 
a  brooding  and  passive  spirit  at  its  heart. 
That  creative  altruism  which  is  the  very 
genius  of  the  life  of  Jesus  is  the  reconciliation 
and  the  synthesis  of  every  productive  element 
in  the  philosophy  of  self-assertion  and  the 
philosophy  of  self-denial. 

Now,  to  be  sure,  many  men  and  women  who 
have  named  the  Christian  name  have  not 
understood  these  things.  Indeed,  in  no  end 
of  relationships  the  very  wonder  of  the  Chris¬ 
tian  religion  lies  in  unsuspected  and  unappro¬ 
priated  corollaries  which  flow  from  the  very 
essential  nature  of  its  life.  The  ascetics  of  the 
Middle  Ages  were  far  enough  from  realizing 
the  synthesis  of  which  we  are  speaking.  But 
many  men  have  realized  just  the  fashion  in 
which  self-assertion  and  self-denial  each  come 
to  their  own  in  the  religion  of  Jesus  Christ. 
And  it  is  not  hard  to  see  that  along  the  line 
of  this  insight  lies  a  perfect  field  for  expan¬ 
sive  achievement  in  the  future.  Indeed,  there 
is  a  sense  in  which  the  Christian  who  under¬ 
stands  his  own  position  is  a  Nietzsche  who 
will  never  be  contented  until  every  man  is  a 
superman,  and  who  knows  that  at  last  the 
very  glory  of  self-denial  is  that  when  it  is 
delivered  from  self-consciousness  and  wrought 
into  the  texture  of  the  good  of  the  world  it 


TRIUMPHANT  GOODNESS 


79 


has  all  the  positive  and  happy  energy  of  self- 
assertion.  Jesus  called  men  to  deny  and  to 
follow.  In  that  sentence  you  have  the  very 
uniting  in  a  higher  unity  of  the  attitudes 
which  have  carried  such  long  and  bitter  con¬ 
tention  into  the  minds  and  hearts  of  men. 

The  moral  history  of  man  may  be  ap¬ 
proached  along  the  line  of  another  set  of 
sharp  and  definite  contrasts.  On  the  one  hand 
we  find  the  philosophy  of  law.  On  the  other 
we  see  the  philosophy  of  lawlessness.  On  the 
one  hand  we  have  the  ethics  of  obedience.  On 
the  other  we  have  the  ethics  of  revolt. 

Law  emerged  very  early  in  the  history  of 
man.  Indeed,  one  of  the  very  earliest  of  the 
types  of  great  men  is  the  lawgiver.  In  Ham¬ 
murabi  we  find  a  very  early  expression  of  that 
regard  for  legal  sanctions  upon  which  the 
very  fabric  of  civilization  is  woven.  And 
Moses  and  Lycurgus  and  Draco  and  Solon  and 
all  the  other  lawgivers  of  antiquity  are  turn¬ 
ing  ethics  to  the  practical  purposes  of  the 
state.  In  the  sixth  century  a.  d.,  when  the 
codification  which  we  know  as  the  Justinian 
code  was  achieved,  the  nation  whose  supreme 
strength  was  in  organization  had  expressed 
the  sanctions  which  lie  back  of  the  orderly 
life  of  man  in  a  form  which  marked  an  epoch 
in  the  moral  history  of  the  race. 


80  SYNTHETIC  CHRISTIANITY 


The  study  of  the  Pax  Romana  is  a  very 
good  approach  to  the  strength  and  the  weak¬ 
ness  of  that  view  of  life  which  builds  human 
relationships  about  legal  sanctions.  On  the 
one  hand  there  is  a  security  over  vast  areas 
such  as  the  world  had  never  known  before. 
The  solid  strength  of  the  Roman  roads  mov¬ 
ing  out  from  the  imperial  city  to  all  parts  of 
the  empire  is  a  fit  symbol  of  that  massive  sta¬ 
bility  which  was  the  most  notable  achieve¬ 
ment  of  the  Roman  genius.  All  the  varied 
races  of  men,  all  the  manifold  types  of  human 
life,  seemed  to  find  a  welcome  and  a  home 
under  the  vast  canopy  of  Roman  jurispru¬ 
dence.  It  does  not  seem  strange  that  a  sensi¬ 
tive  and  understanding  mind  like  that  of 
Virgil,  dreading  disorder  on  the  one  hand  and 
believing  in  the  fine  flower  and  fruitfulness 
of  an  orderly  life  on  the  other,  should  have 
consecrated  all  his  powers  to  the  idealizing  of 
that  solid  authority  which  Augustus  was 
founding  and  to  the  writing  of  its  sanctions 
deep  in  the  affections  of  men.  When  we  in¬ 
spect  the  decay  of  the  life  of  civilization  and 
the  widespread  disorder  which  fell  like  a 
blight  upon  the  life  of  mankind  when  the 
Roman  Empire  disintegrated,  and  contrast 
this  wild  and  lawless  life,  with  ruin  and  deca¬ 
dence  everywhere,  with  the  highly  articulated 


TRIUMPHANT  GOODNESS 


81 


life,  with  its  commerce  and  its  wealth  and  its 
learning,  during  the  centuries  when  Roman 
power  was  most  potent  and  productive,  it 
seems  that  if  we  value  civilization  at  all,  we 
must  he  ready  to  accept  an  ethical  code  which 
bases  life  upon  the  observance  of  law. 

The  matter  is  not  quite  so  simple,  however, 
as  it  looks  upon  first  inspection.  As  we 
analyze  the  Roman  life  more  closely  we  dis¬ 
cover  that  the  Roman  genius  was  much 
stronger  on  the  side  of  organization  than  on 
the  side  of  creative  energy.  It  is  to  Greece 
rather  than  to  Rome  that  we  look  for  the  great 
seminal  qualities  in  philosophy,  in  art  and 
in  literature.  At  its  best  Rome  was  a  wonder¬ 
fully  gifted  imitator,  but  even  at  its  best,  back 
of  the  Roman  work  you  find  Greek  inspira¬ 
tion.  The  great  Roman  philosophers  were  the 
representatives  of  Greek  schools  of  thought. 
The  Roman  could  build  roads  and  bridges, 
and  he  could  weld  the  world  together  into 
such  solidarity  as  it  had  never  known.  But 
he  could  not  furnish  the  flame  of  fire,  the  crea¬ 
tive  impulse,  which  is  back  of  the  supreme 
activities  of  the  mind  of  man.  It  is  tremen¬ 
dously  significant  to  observe,  on  the  other 
hand,  that  Greece,  which  was  strongest  in  the 
realm  of  creative  energy,  was  weakest  on  the 
side  of  organization.  The  nation  which  was 


82  SYNTHETIC  CHRISTIANITY 


the  inspirer  of  the  mind  of  man  was  not  the 
lawgiver  of  the  world.  It  is  also  true  that  as 
we  follow  Roman  life  through  the  period 
when  its  organization  became  most  highly 
articulated  and  its  authority  most  absolute, 
the  Roman  world  itself  begins  to  show  more 
and  more  clearly  signs  of  decreasing  intellec¬ 
tual  vigor  and  at  last  of  waning  vitality.  The 
machinery  of  its  life  seems  to  become  too  vast 
for  the  play  of  its  mind.  The  nation  which 
gave  order  to  the  world  borrowed  its  inter¬ 
preters  of  beauty  and  its  leaders  in  the  quest 
for  truth. 

So  we  are  not  surprised  that  in  many 
nations  and  during  many  periods  men  have 
lived  who  have  become  the  apostles  of  revolt. 
They  have  regarded  walls  as  the  boundaries 
of  prisons  and  not  as  the  protection  of  states. 
To  them  authority  has  been  synonymous  with 
tyranny.  Law  has  been  one  with  autocracy. 
They  have  longed  for  freedom  where  the 
emancipated  spirit  of  man  could  go  forth  with 
all  the  intense  passion  of  its  own  great 
powers.  When  they  have  carried  their  views 
to  the  full  length  of  their  logical  implications, 
like  Proudhon,  they  have  become  philosophical 
anarchists  seeking  an  order  where  there  is  no 
coercion  and  a  social  life  where  no  force  com¬ 
pels  men  to  observe  community  sanctions. 


TRIUMPHANT  GOODNESS 


S3 


When  they  have  been  the  apostles  of  an  im¬ 
pulse  rather  than  the  exponents  of  a  clearly 
thought-out  philosophy  of  life,  they  have  been 
audacious  men  of  letters,  hotly  condemning 
those  things  in  the  life  of  their  time  which 
they  have  felt  stood  in  the  way  of  free  and 
creative  expression.  The  French  Revolution, 
which  abolished  the  old  regime  in  France 
itself  and  indirectly  influenced  so  much  of 
Europe  and  the  world,  felt  the  mighty  move¬ 
ment  of  a  tremendous  yeast  of  lawless  energy. 
This  energy  became  at  last  so  destructive  that 
the  tyranny  of  Napoleon  was  accepted  for  the 
sake  of  order,  and  all  over  Europe  swept  those 
tides  of  reaction  which  found  full  expression 
in  the  era  of  Metternich.  It  seems  pretty  clear 
that  revolt  is  most  alluring  when  it  is  ex¬ 
pressed  in  hot  and  derisive  words.  When  it 
enters  the  field  of  action  and  goes  to  the  full 
limit  of  its  enthusiasm,  it  has  a  way  of  burn¬ 
ing  down  the  house  which  it  was  going  to 
reform.  In  fact,  although  the  philosophy  of 
law  and  the  philosophy  of  lawlessness  seem  so 
utterly  irreconcilable,  the  more  we  study  the 
matter,  the  more  clear  it  becomes  that  each 
represents  a  fundamental  impulse  which  must 
be  kept  alive  in  the  world.  And  we  must  seek 
a  higher  unity  which  conserves  the  true  and 
productive  elements  in  each. 


84  SYNTHETIC  CHRISTIANITY 


The  truth  is  that  law  can  render  its  best 
services  only  among  a  people  who  are  full  of 
creative  enthusiasm.  And  it  is  equally  true 
that  the  apostle  of  revolt  is  able  to  play  a 
really  effective  role  only  against  a  background 
of  solid  and  orderly  life.  Whenever  solidarity 
becomes  oppressive  you  need  the  eager  ener¬ 
gies  of  the  men  of  revolt.  Whenever  revolt 
pushes  on  to  the  point  where  it  begins  to  dis¬ 
integrate  those  sanctions  which  are  struc¬ 
tural  in  civilizations,  you  need  to  feel  the 
strong  and  unhesitating  hand  of  law.  It  is 
when  the  two  impulses  work  together,  each 
acting  as  a  check  upon  the  other,  each  witness¬ 
ing  to  a  truth  that  the  other  is  constantly  for¬ 
getting,  that  it  is  possible  to  have  anything 
which  deserves  the  name  of  progress.  There 
is  an  even  deeper  psychological  possibility 
than  this.  It  is  possible  for  obedience  itself 
to  become  the  expression  of  so  free  and  spon¬ 
taneous  a  spirit  that  the  authority  of  law  be¬ 
comes  as  free  and  creative  a  thing  as  the 
energy  of  revolt.  When  a  man  has  come  to 
love  the  law  which  he  obeys  he  has  all  the 
freedom  of  which  the  anarchist  is  so  proud 
and  all  the  advantages  of  a  stable  society 
which  will  not  go  to  pieces  under  the  blows 
of  the  lawless  spirit.  The  truth  is  that  not 
law  itself  but  a  slavish  attitude  toward  law 


TRIUMPHANT  GOODNESS 


85 


creates  the  servile  spirit  and  depletes  the  crea¬ 
tive  energies  of  men. 

It  is  worth  our  while  to  pause  for  the  obser¬ 
vation  that  the  harmony  of  which  we  are 
speaking  is  all  the  while  in  a  measure  being 
realized  in  the  democracies  of  the  world.  For 
democracy  is  orderly  freedom.  It  is  revolt 
become  law-abiding.  Its  laws  come  up  from 
the  people  and  not  down  from  some  autocratic 
authority.  From  this  point  of  view  we  can 
see  that  it  was  not  the  presence  of  law  but, 
rather,  the  autocratic  nature  of  authority 
which  depleted  the  vitality  of  the  organism 
of  the  Roman,  state.  When  law  becomes  the 
expression  of  the  popular  will  it  represents  in 
its  own  way  the  wedlock  of  liberty  and 
authority. 

But  we  are  most  interested  in  the  fashion 
in  which  these  two  opposing  principles  are 
reconciled  and  harmonized  in  the  higher  unity 
which  is  offered  to  them  in  the  Christian 
religion.  Indeed,  we  find  traces  of  this  higher 
unity  in  the  writings  which  come  out  of  that 
life  whose  tale  is  told  in  the  Old  Testament. 
For  the  Old  Testament  has  its  own  Rome  of 
law  and  its  own  Athens  of  spontaneous  energy 
and  its  own  meeting  of  the  two  in  the  loftiest 
insights  of  those  prophets  who  saw  the  recon¬ 
ciling  of  the  divine  will  and  human  desire. 


86  SYNTHETIC  CHRISTIANITY 


The  classical  passage  in  respect  of  this  recon¬ 
ciliation  is  the  great  word  in  Jeremiah  where 
the  prophet  foresees  the  time  when  the  law  of 
Jehovah  will  be  written  on  the  heart  of  man. 
This  is  as  perfect  an  expression  of  the  idea  of 
the  synthesis  of  freedom  and  law  as  one 
could  well  desire. 

But  what  is  at  best  the  sudden  flash  of  in¬ 
sight  in  the  Old  Testament  becomes  the  very 
warp  and  woof  of  the  fabric  of  the  New.  One 
of  the  most  fundamental  achievements  of 
Jesus  lay  precisely  in  the  fact  that  he  made 
the  Ten  Commandments  fascinating.  In  him 
goodness  was  not  a  demand  coming  from  with¬ 
out.  It  was  a  spirit  rising  from  within.  The 
mechanical  obedience  of  the  copy  book  was 
impossible  to  him  because  the  law  of  God  was 
alive  in  his  life.  And  for  this  very  reason  he 
kept  it  as  no  man  of  mechanical  and  slavish 
obedience  could  ever  do.  And  all  of  this 
becomes  the  very  heart  of  the  message  of  Paul 
to  the  world.  For  Paul  knew  the  way  of  slav¬ 
ish  obedience,  and  when  the  revolt  came  it 
was  not  into  license  but  into  the  freedom  of 
spontaneous  obedience.  “With  freedom  did 
Christ  make  you  free,”  Paul  cried.  If  one 
may  be  pardoned  a  paradox  which  none  the 
less  is  an  almost  literal  expression  of  the 
truth,  Paul  knew  of  nothing  so  gloriously  law- 


TRIUMPHANT  GOODNESS 


87 


less  as  obedience.  You  find  the  same  note  in 
all  the  greatest  evangelical  piety,  and  some¬ 
times  Luther  gives  it  such  exuberant  expres¬ 
sion  as  almost  to  court  misunderstanding.  Of 
course  there  have  been  times  when  the  church 
did  not  understand  the  synthesis.  When  the 
church  became  an  uninspired  Judaism  wear¬ 
ing  the  name  of  Jesus,  the  Reformation  re¬ 
called  it  to  the  first  fine  rapture  which  it  was 
forgetting.  And  so  it  has  been  once  and  again. 
But  in  the  soul  of  the  Christian  religion  there 
has  always  been  found  this  capacity  to  unite 
in  a  higher  unity  the  apostles  of  law  and  the 
apostles  of  revolt. 

So  we  see  in  respect  of  a  number  of  the 
characteristic  contrasts  which  have  arisen  in 
the  course  of  the  ethical  thought  and  experi¬ 
ence  of  man  that  Christianity  comes  as  a  syn¬ 
thesis  uniting  all  that  is  good  in  a  large  and 
productive  harmony.  But  it  does  something 
much  more  fundamental  than  this.  In  Chris¬ 
tianity  you  have  not  ethical  theory  primarily, 
but  first  of  all  moral  and  spiritual  experience. 
You  have  ethics  alive  in  the  soul  of  man.  You 
have  an  inner  inspiration  which  becomes  an 
outer  activity.  You  have  something  more 
fundamental  than  a  system  of  ethics.  You 
have  a  marching  song.  Indeed,  you  have  some¬ 
thing  deeper  than  that.  You  have  the  spirit 


88  SYNTHETIC  CHRISTIANITY 


which  makes  men  desire  to  sing  as  they  march 
and  the  creative  inspiration  which  creates  the 
song.  It  is  only  as  goodness  becomes  a  tri¬ 
umphant  experience  that  we  come  to  actual 
comprehension  either  of  its  nature  or  of  its 
authority.  And  this  is  just  what  happens 
when  men  experience  its  meaning  in  the  re¬ 
ligion  of  Jesus  Christ. 


LECTURE  III 


TRIUMPHANT  BEAUTY 

Philosophers  have  been  put  to  a  good  deal 
of  perplexity  in  the  matter  of  working  out  a 
theory  of  aesthetics.  It  is  clear  that  the  love 
of  beauty  is  in  the  world.  It  is  clear  that  it 
has  had  a  marvelous  if  checkered  history.  It 
is  clear  that  it  furnishes  the  commanding 
motive  in  many  lives  and  a  powerful  motive  in 
the  lives  of  multitudes.  But  from  whence 
does  it  come?  What  is  the  basis  of  its  appeal? 
What  is  its  real  meaning  in  human  life? 
How  is  it  related  to  the  love  of  the  true  and 
the  love  of  the  good?  What  place  does  it 
have  in  a  fully  rounded  interpretation  of  life? 
Our  task  in  this  lecture  is  a  good  deal  less 
ambitious  than  the  range  of  the  inquiries  sug¬ 
gested  by  these  questions.  We  will  content 
ourselves  with  examining  some  of  the  forms 
in  which  the  love  of  beauty  has  expressed  itself 
and  with  attempting  to  appraise  their  rela¬ 
tion  to  the  Christian  religion  with  the  hope  of 
getting  some  light  on  the  possibilities  of 
Christianity  in  relation  to  a  synthetic  treat¬ 
ment  of  the  realm  of  beauty. 

89 


90  SYNTHETIC  CHRISTIANITY 


In  a  sense  human  life  is  just  a  great  series 
of  quests.  And  of  these  one  of  the  very  most 
fascinating  is  the  quest  for  beauty.  Somehow 
at  once  it  seems  to  bring  us  into  contact  with 
invisible  and  impalpable  values.  From  some¬ 
where  deep  in  the  nature  of  man  the  desire  for 
loveliness  arises  and  he  proceeds  to  find  a 
symbol  and  an  expression  of  that  desire  in 
the  world  of  things  or  the  world  of  sounds. 
The  wonder  of  the  world  in  which  he  finds 
himself,  the  splendor  of  the  night  sky,  the 
challenge  of  color  and  form  in  all  living 
things,  the  amazing  appeal  of  the  songs  of 
birds — these  speak  to  something  far  in  the 
depths  of  his  spirit  and  without  much  attempt 
to  philosophize  about  it,  he  responds  with  all 
his  heart.  Then,  not  contented  with  the  love¬ 
liness  which  he  finds,  he  begins  to  create.  He 
forms  objects  which  express  his  sense  of  this 
invisible  and  wonderful  appeal  which  has 
moved  his  heart.  They  may  be  very  crude  at 
first,  but  he  sees  them  with  the  eyes  of  the 
emotion  which  has  swept  over  his  spirit.  He 
makes  sounds,  or  creates  instruments  which 
make  sounds,  having  the  same  fathomless 
appeal.  Their  first  value  is  not  in  what  they 
are.  It  is  in  the  fact  that  they  are  symbols 
and  expressions  of  a  sense  of  infinite  loveli¬ 
ness  and  of  infinite  mystery.  And  so  at  last 


TRIUMPHANT  BEAUTY 


91 


the  quest  for  beauty  becomes  a  fully  conscious 
eagerness  to  work  out  all  the  implications  of 
an  aspect  of  life  as  actual  as  physical  hunger, 
as  intellectual  eagerness,  and  as  the  passion 
for  goodness. 

The  quest  for  beauty  is  both  a  glorious  and 
a  tragic  thing.  It  has  produced  a  series  of 
arts  which  at  their  best  have  had  a  loveliness 
which  forever  haunts  the  imagination  of  man. 
It  has  made  its  own  contribution  to  the  char¬ 
acter  of  many  a  nation,  for  the  love  of  beauty 
at  its  highest  is  full  of  moral  and  spiritual 
power.  But  the  love  of  beauty  may  be  isolated 
from  these  moral  and  spiritual  sanctions, 
and  then  it  becomes  a  disintegrating  and  even 
an  evil  thing.  The  Italian  Renaissance 
reached  the  point  where  all  its  sanctions 
needed  to  be  lifted  into  full  moral  and 
spiritual  meaning  or  it  would  sink  lower  and 
lower  until  dark  possibilities  of  loathsome 
sensuality  and  uncontrolled  brutality 
emerged.  And  the  tragedy  of  the  Italian 
Renaissance  was  just  its  ethical  failure.  In 
the  long  run  the  love  of  beauty  is  sure  to  be¬ 
come  a  diseased  thing  unless  you  can  give  it 
a  conscience.  Some  groups  of  men  have 
despaired  of  ever  putting  a  conscience  into  the 
heart  of  beauty.  These  men  have  been  respon¬ 
sible  for  that  repudiation  of  loveliness  which 


92  SYNTHETIC  CHRISTIANITY 


we  so  often  connect  with,  the  Puritan  move¬ 
ment.  As  a  matter  of  fact,  some  of  the  great 
Puritans  were  also  great  lovers  of  beauty. 
Milton  kept  the  lamp  of  loveliness  burning  as 
did  few  other  men  in  the  world  during  his 
time.  But  it  cannot  be  denied  that  many 
earnest  men  completely  despaired  of  ever  unit¬ 
ing  the  love  of  righteousness  and  the  love  of 
beauty.  And  there  are  great  branches  of  the 
Christian  Church  which  still  feel  the  inhibi¬ 
tions  of  this  despairing  attitude.  Viewing  the 
matter  critically,  we  come  to  see  very  clearly 
that  the  love  of  beauty,  like  beauty  itself,  has 
been  connected  with  some  of  the  noblest  and 
some  of  the  most  ignoble  things  in  the  world. 
Beauty,  like  the  loveliness  of  those  women’s 
faces  which  great  artists  have  beheld  with 
such  rapture,  has  in  some  cases  been  conse¬ 
crated  to  the  highest  ends  and  in  some  cases 
has  been  prostituted  to  the  lowest.  A  deca¬ 
dent  nation  is  likely  to  see  beauty  through 
decadent  eyes,  and  its  enjoyment  of  beauty 
may  easily  become  a  hectic  and  psychopathic 
thing.  A  strong  nation  is  likely  to  infuse  its 
own  virile  and  robust  qualities  into  its  inter¬ 
pretation  and  expression  of  the  love  of  beauty, 
and  so  strength  and  loveliness  will  meet  in 
noble  wedlock. 

It  is  tremendously  significant  that  the  first 


TRIUMPHANT  BEAUTY 


93 


great  art  of  the  world  expressed  beauty  in  the 
terms  of  strength.  The  art  of  ancient  Egypt 
was  the  challenge  which  the  daring  spirit  of 
man  created  as  he  faced  the  ugly  and  bitter 
fact  of  mortality.  It  was  as  if  the  soul  of  man 
had  never  realized  its  own  imperial  nature 
until  at  last  in  the  valley  of  the  Nile  the  full 
sense  of  the  tragedy  of  death  swept  wave  upon 
wave  over  the  spirit  of  men  who  felt  some¬ 
thing  eternal  and  unconquerable  in  their  own 
mighty  spirits.  Monuments  like  the  pyramids 
are.  the  prayers  of  the  ancient  world  thank¬ 
ing  whatever  gods  there  be  for  man’s  uncon¬ 
querable  soul.  They  are  more  than  this.  They 
are  a  claim,  a  demand  made  in  solid  masonry 
that  the  universe  shall  somehow  justify  and 
vindicate  this  unappeasable  spirit,  this  death¬ 
less  kingliness  which  man  finds  in  his  own 
soul.  This  inner  vigor,  bending  the  hard 
materials  of  the  physical  world  to  express  its 
behests,  is  of  the  very  genius  of  art  as  strength. 
This  mood  of  challenge  you  find  expressed  in 
most  memorable  fashion  in  another  ancient 
work  of  art,  the  book  of  Job,  which  we  have 
preserved  for  us  among  the  documents  which 
make  up  the  Old  Testament.  Here  the  prob¬ 
lem  of  unjust  suffering  as  well  as  the  problem 
of  death  emerges.  Here  we  have  the  same 
imperial  spirit,  though  it  comes  before  us  now 


94  SYNTHETIC  CHRISTIANITY 


with  a  new  quality  of  ethical  passion.  And 
when  the  great  words  ring  out,  “I  know  that 
my  vindicator  liveth,”  you  have  the  apex  of  a 
moral  and  spiritual  pyramid  of  speech  in 
which  the  spirit  of  man  expresses  itself  in 
triumphant  strength.  It  is  worth  our  while 
to  notice  that  very  early  man  learned  that 
whatever  he  could  do  with  things  he  could  also 
do  with  words.  And  sometimes  he  could  do 
it  with  words  in  a  surer  and  more  effective 
fashion,  bending  words  to  his  purpose  with  a 
power  which  made  them  the  immortal  expres¬ 
sion  of  some  experience  which  had  become  the 
central  and  mastering  meaning  of  his  life. 
With  the  sense  of  beauty  as  strength  we 
usually  find  a  certain  austere  grandeur  of  line, 
a  grave  and  lofty  majesty  of  words  befitting 
the  fundamental  intuition  which  is  expressing 
itself  in  such  artistic  form.  The  rugged  moun¬ 
tains  lifting  their  rude  shoulders  against  the 
sky  form  the  counterpart  in  nature  to  this 
variety  of  art.  The  mood  has  never  passed 
completely  from  the  soul  of  man.  The  love  of 
beauty  has  taken  manifold  forms,  but  once  and 
again  we  find  this  note  of  beauty  as  strength 
emerging.  We  have  already  seen  that  it  finds 
memorable  expression  in  the  Old  Testament. 
Indeed,  we  shall  not  be  far  wrong  in  summing 
up  the  highest  Old  Testament  attitude  toward 


TRIUMPHANT  BEAUTY  95 

this  matter  in  the  great  and  ancient  words, 
“Strength  and  beauty  are  in  thy  sanctuary.” 
Worship  was  the  meeting  place  of  strength 
and  beauty  in  the  minds  of  those  who  had 
thought  most  deeply  about  the  matter  and 
who  understood  it  best. 

A  good  many  artists  have  served  Christian¬ 
ity  in  less  than  the  happiest  fashion  in  their 
portraiture  of  Jesus  when  it  comes  to  this 
matter  of  the  relation  of  strength  and  beauty 
in  the  life  of  its  Founder.  They  have  created 
a  traditional  figure  of  such  delicate  and 
almost  feminine  spiritual  loveliness  as  hardly 
to  suggest  Tennyson’s  great  apostrophe, 
“Strong  Son  of  God,  Immortal  Love.”  Yet 
the  insight  of  Tennyson  is  right  and  the  great 
statue  of  Thorwaldsen,  “Come  Unto  Me,”  has 
at  least  this  quality  of  uniting  the  sense  of 
power  with  the  sense  of  goodness  and  beauty. 
But,  of  course,  we  do  not  get  to  the  root  of 
this  matter  by  calling  a  catalogue  of  artists 
or  sculptors  or  poets.  The  question  has  to 
do  with  the  fundamental  genius  of  Christian¬ 
ity  itself.  And  no  candid  student  of  the 
Gospels  can  deny  the  tremendous  impression 
of  strength  which  these  documents  convey  as 
they  present  to  us  the  figure  of  Jesus.  It  is 
not  merely  that  we  sometimes  stand  in  the 
presence  of  a  flash  of  dynamic  indignation 


96  SYNTHETIC  CHRISTIANITY 


before  which  men  are  powerless.  It  is  not 
merely  that  Jesus  passes  through  a  crowd 
eager  to  throw  him  from  the  edge  of  a  cliff 
with  such  regal  mien  that  no  one  dares  to 
touch  him.  It  is  not  merely  that  his  words 
once  and  again  come  forth  with  a  fearless 
robustness  which  gives  them  a  sort  of  granite 
strength.  More  than  this,  Jesus’  whole  life, 
with  its  sure  and  masterful  quality  of  self- 
control,  was  a  sort  of  crystallization  of 
strength  into  action.  And  when  the  crisis 
came  the  very  quality  of  his  passive  endurance 
was  made  of  sterner  stuff  than  ever  sent  sol¬ 
diers  over  the  trenches  to  their  foe.  That 
kind  of  endurance  is  heroism  lifted  to  its  very 
highest  power.  And  with  all  this  there  was  a 
gracious  beauty  of  life  which  turned  strength 
itself  into  an  immortal  loveliness.  In  its 
Founder  at  least  Christianity  reveals  the  ele¬ 
ments  of  strength  and  beauty  in  abiding 
union.  In  him  strength  is  beauty  and  beauty 
is  strength. 

It  is,  of  course,  in  the  Athens  of  the  period 
lying  in  and  about  the  fifth  century  that 
beauty  first  actually  comes  to  its  own.  And 
here  we  see  beauty  expressed  as  serene  com¬ 
pleteness.  When  Professor  Paul  Shorey  spoke 
of  the  passionate  pursuit  of  passionless  per¬ 
fection,  he  captured  a  phrase  which  with 


TRIUMPHANT  BEAUTY 


97 


singular  felicity  expresses  much  that  is  most 
distinctive  of  the  Greek  sense  of  beauty.  The 
Greek  temple,  which  seemed  a  part  of  the  very 
landscape  where  it  rose,  was  a  sort  of  mate¬ 
rial  deliverance  from  the  world  of  human 
struggle  and  striving,  a  sort  of  expression  in 
tangible  form  of  that  perfect  and  harmonious 
repose  which  can  never  cease  to  speak  its  own 
message  to  the  man  who  has  once  felt  the 
power  of  its  still  and  serene  harmony.  The 
Greek  language  itself  became  the  vehicle  of 
this  sense  of  complete  and  untroubled  loveli¬ 
ness.  The  very  structure  of  the  Attic  speech 
caught  the  spirit  of  its  great  artists,  and  the 
typical  Greek  writing  often  seems  like  a  Greek 
temple  turned  into  words.  The  Greek  drama 
caught  the  passionate  pain  of  man  and  ex¬ 
pressed  it  in  deathless  words.  But  in  the  very 
process  of  expression  the  struggle  and  the 
pain  were  lifted  into  some  lofty  realm  of  still 
and  grave  contemplation.  It  is  as  if  you  are 
seeing  time  from  the  heart  of  eternity.  It  is 
as  if  from  the  stainless  heights  of  Olympus 
you  see  with  crystal  clearness  the  story  of 
man  in  a  vast  perspective  where  a  perfect 
poise  and  quiet  work  their  own  lofty  magic 
even  upon  the  most  tragic  things.  To  the 
typical  Greek  the  love  of  beauty  was  not  a 
thing  which  happily  belonged  to  some  bit  of 


98  SYNTHETIC  CHRISTIANITY 


his  life.  It  was  life  itself.  Ugliness  hurt  him 
like  a  sharp  wound.  And  the  complete  and 
the  serene  filled  his  spirit  with  something  of 
its  own  cool  and  ample  and  splendid  loveli¬ 
ness.  This  fundamental  mood  worked  itself 
out  in  many  qualities  of  chaste  simplicity  in 
Greek  art  at  its  best.  It  poured  its  inspira¬ 
tion  into  Greek  philosophy  and  came  forth  in 
deep  and  fruitful  philosophical  insights.  It 
wrought  itself  deeply  into  that  deathless  thing 
which  we  call  the  Greek  spirit.  Over  and 
over  again  this  passionate  search  for  passion¬ 
less  completeness  has  emerged  in  many  a 
nation,  in  many  a  land,  and  in  many  an  age. 
And  once  tasted,  the  wine  of  Attica  can  never 
be  forgotten. 

We  seem  in  a  vastly  different  world  when 
we  stand  in  the  presence  of  the  typical  art 
of  the  Middle  Ages,  best  expressed  in  those 
great  Gothic  cathedrals  which  turned  the 
deepest  feeling  of  these  Middle  Ages  into 
stone.  Here  the  perfect  and  passionate  poise 
has  disappeared.  Life  is  seen  as  struggle. 
The  harsher  aspects  are  included  in  the  total 
vision  of  beauty.  With  a  grim  and  marvelous 
humor  gargoyles  leer  out  at  you  from  the 
most  mightily  upreaching  cathedrals.  The 
sense  of  beauty  has  ceased  to  be  a  sense  of 
stainless  completeness.  It  has  become  a  sense 


TRIUMPHANT  BEAUTY 


99 


of  perpetual  aspiration.  The  pointed  arch  is 
the  true  symbol  of  Gothic  building,  and  it  is 
the  expression  of  the  very  soul  of  the  Middle 
Ages.  It  is  an  endless  movement  toward  the 
perfect,  a  realization  that  in  some  marvelous 
and  glorious  fashion  the  goal  is  in  the  quest. 
The  circle  is  a  fit  symbol  of  the  Greek  sense 
of  beauty.  It  leaves  no  more  to  be  said.  It 
is  finished.  It  is  entirely  complete.  It  is  a 
perfectly  glorious  thing.  But  it  has  this 
tragic  element:  it  is  the  period  at  the  end 
of  the  sentence.  There  comes  a  time  when 
its  very  perfection  robs  it  of  creative  power. 
A  Gothic  spire  has  just  the  opposite  effect. 
Its  marvel  is  that  it  is  perpetually  suggesting 
the  element  of  exhaustlessness  in  the  spirit 
of  man.  There  is  no  period  in  the  sentences 
suggested  by  the  sense  of  beauty  as  aspiration. 
It  simply  goes  on  forever.  It  is  as  exhaust¬ 
less  as  life  itself.  This  exhaustlessness  of 
aspiration  and  this  capacity  to  incorporate 
the  things  which  seem  the  very  antithesis  of 
the  serene  quiet  of  beauty  give  a  new  quality 
to  the  spirit  of  man  in  all  his  relationships. 
The  sense  of  beauty  ceases  to  be  an  escape 
from  life.  And  Greek  art  was  all  the  while 
becoming  just  that.  It  becomes  a  battle  for 
beauty  in  the  midst  of  life.  And  it  finds  that 
battle  itself  the  most  beautiful  thing  in  all  the 


100  SYNTHETIC  CHRISTIANITY 


world.  Not  the  repose  of  attainment  but  the 
relentless  conflict  in  the  name  of  the  ideal 
becomes  itself  a  thing  of  supreme  and  match¬ 
less  beauty.  The  pointed  arch  has  its  own 
tragedy  of  incompleteness.  But  it  has  its 
own  glory  of  perpetual  promise. 

Here,  again,  you  have  an  expression  of  the 
intuition  in  respect  of  beauty  in  the  realm  of 
literature.  The  Divine  Comedy }  by  Dante  Ali¬ 
ghieri,  is  a  Gothic  cathedral  turned  into  the 
most  marvelous  poetry.  It  is  completely  satu¬ 
rated  with  the  Gothic  spirit.  You  see  this  at 
the  very  beginning  in  Dante’s  use  of  the 
Italian  language.  He  does  not  use  a  speech 
associated  Avith  the  distant  and  stainless  per¬ 
fection  of  classic  artistic  ideals.  He  uses  a 
tongue  never  yet  bent  to  the  greatest  purposes 
of  literature,  and  in  his  use  of  that  tongue  he 
transforms  it.  The  passage  through  Hell  and 
Purgatory  and  into  the  glories  of  Heaven  is 
the  tale  of  struggling  movement  toward  a 
perfect  goal.  You  have  all  the  spiritual  mean¬ 
ing  of  the  pointed  arch  in  the  very  story  of 
the  soul  of  Dante  as  he  moves  through  the 
dolorous  woe  of  the  Inferno ,  the  discipline  of 
that  Purgatorio  where  there  is  much  pain  but 
no  unhappiness  because  all  the  pain  is  on  the 
way  to  victory  and  joy,  and  moAung  out  into 
the  expanding  glories  of  the  perfect  consum- 


TRIUMPHANT  BEAUTY 


101 


mation.  Indeed,  the  Paradiso  itself  is  sug¬ 
gestive  of  pure  and  perpetual  and  glowing 
passion.  The  perfect  rose  of  love  and  lire  is 
different  enough  from  the  cool  and  unkindled 
loveliness  of  the  classic  dreams  of  beauty.  But 
the  more  closely  you  come  to  the  heart  of 
Dante’s  masterpiece  the  more  you  discover 
that  there  is  something  besides  the  Gothic 
spirit.  The  sense  of  beauty  is,  indeed,  the 
sense  of  endless  aspiration  and  of  endless  ful¬ 
fillment.  But  with  all  that  there  is  a  wonder¬ 
ful  appropriation  of  the  classic  mood.  It  is 
not  by  chance  that  Virgil  guides  Dante 
through  so  many  of  his  amazing  and  unbeliev¬ 
able  experiences.  For  in  the  Bivine  Comedy 
the  sense  of  serene  completeness  is  all  the 
while  finding  its  way  through  the  confusion 
and  turmoil  and  tragedy.  And  the  Paradiso 
itself,  for  all  the  flame  of  its  undying  fire  of 
blazing  beauty,  holds  at  the  heart  of  its  per¬ 
fect  rose  some  strange  suggestion  of  that  pas¬ 
sion  for  completeness  which  never  left  the 
spirit  of  Attica.  In  the  Divine  Comedy  we 
have  at  least  a  hint  of  a  higher  unity,  of  a 
synthesis  in  which  the  deepest  insight  of  the 
Greek  intuition  of  beauty  and  the  noblest  in¬ 
sight  of  the  Middle  Ages  may  be  united. 
Aspiration  and  completeness  must,  indeed,  be 
perpetually  meeting  in  a  living  experience  if 


102  SYNTHETIC  CHRISTIANITY 


the  sense  of  beauty  is  to  be  a  growing  and  pro¬ 
ductive  thing  in  the  life  of  the  world. 

When  we  go  back  to  Jesus — and,  of  course, 
we  are  not  forgetting  that  the  Divine  Comedy 
is  itself  a  great  Christian  poem — we  are  aston¬ 
ished  to  find  that  the  portrait  of  the  Master 
in  the  Gospels  has  precisely  those  funda¬ 
mental  notes  which  give  their  meaning  to  the 
Greek  and  the  Gothic  types.  Who  can  follow 
the  story  of  his  life  from  the  temptations  to 
Calvary  without  feeling  the  perpetual  throb 
of  struggle,  of  aspiration  after  a  great  ideal 
and  the  perpetual  reach  forward,  the  per¬ 
petual  endeavor  to  make  it  completely  real 
with  the  materials  of  this  mortal  life.  There 
is  precisely  the  same  sense  of  exhaustless  pos¬ 
sibilities  in  the  portrait  of  Jesus  in  the 
Gospels  which  you  find  in  Gothic  architecture. 
Indeed,  at  last  you  begin  to  suspect  that  there 
is  a  sense  in  which  a  Gothic  cathedral  is  just 
the  spirit  of  Jesus  caught  up  in  human  hearts 
and  turned  into  stone.  But,  on  the  other 
hand,  who  can  read  the  Gospels  and  escape 
the  sense  of  fulfillment,  the  sense  of  complete¬ 
ness,  the  sense  of  poise  which  comes  from  the 
life  of  Jesus?  What  matchless  serenity,  what 
perfect  harmony,  what  entire  control  of  all 
the  forces  and  all  the  elements  of  his  life  Jesus 
shows  all  the  while !  There  is  wonderful  pas- 


TRIUMPHANT  BEAUTY 


103 


sion.  But  all  the  endless  emotions  are  fused 
into  an  inner  serenity  which  baffles  descrip¬ 
tion  and  yet  forever  haunts  the  conscience  and 
the  imagination  of  men.  The  poise  of  inte¬ 
grated  passion  seems  to  be  a  phrase  which 
fairly  well  characterizes  the  thing  which  we 
find  alive  in  the  life  of  Jesus.  But  the  very 
phrase  suggests  a  synthesis  of  the  passion  of 
the  Gothic  and  the  poise  of  the  Greek.  Indeed, 
the  more  we  study  this  one  life  the  more  we 
see  in  it  the  perfect  wedlock  of  aspiration  and 
completeness,  an  aspiration  which  goes  on 
forever  and  a  fulfillment  and  completion 
which  at  every  stage  match  the  aspiration. 

This  very  thing  has  at  least  been  an  ideal 
never  far  lost  from  the  heart  of  the  church. 
For  Christianity  in  action  is  precisely  the 
place  where  the  rainbow  touches  the  ground, 
the  place  where  the  ideal  meets  and  masters 
the  real.  It  is  true  that  very  often  there  are 
too  many  gargoyles  in  the  Christian  edifice. 
But  at  least  the  edifice  itself  is  a  perpetual 
witness  to  the  belief  that  the  ideal  may  master 
the  real,  that  aspiration  may  move  on  to  com¬ 
pleteness.  In  its  fundamental  spirit,  then, 
Christianity  offers  a  synthesis  in  which  the 
noblest  elements  of  the  Attic  spirit  and  the 
most  passionate  aspirations  made  articulate 
in  the  art  of  the  Middle  Ages  may  meet  to- 


104  SYNTHETIC  CHRISTIANITY 


gether  in  the  harmony  of  a  unity  which 
includes  them  both. 

The  note  of  realism  which  we  find  expressed 
with  such  rugged  gusto  in  the  gargoyles  was 
bound  to  have  a  history  of  its  own  as  time 
went  on.  The  Renaissance  was  in  a  measure 
a  going  back  to  classic  thoughts  and  classic 
ideals.  But  all  the  while  something  else  was 
happening.  Even  in  the  thirteenth  century 
Roger  Bacon  had  been  conducting  practical 
scientific  experiments  and  the  new  freedom 
which  came  with  the  Renaissance  gradually 
became  a  going  back  to  nature  as  well  as  a 
going  back  to  Greece.  So  the  dawn  of  the 
scientific  era  cast  its  first  dim  light  over  the 
edges  of  the  world  and  at  last  brightened  into 
the  full  light  of  the  age  of  experiment,  of  the 
mastery  of  the  forces  of  nature  and  of  all  the 
achievements  which  made  themselves  at  last 
into  the  age  of  science.  Along  with  this 
development  the  artist  was  having  his  own 
experience  of  going  back  to  nature.  The  ex¬ 
periment  took  many  forms.  One  of  them  was 
a  sense  of  beauty  as  an  honest  reflection  of  the 
actual.  This  spirit  has  had  a  long  and  varied 
history.  It  has  expressed  itself  in  a  type  of 
fiction  which  has  made  a  close  and  analytical 
study  of  all  the  slime  and  evil  of  life,  giving 
a  sort  of  scientific  accuracy  to  its  picturing 


TRIUMPHANT  BEAUTY 


105 


of  the  most  loathsome  aspects  of  human 
experience.  It  has  been  characterized  by 
notable  honesty.  It  has  been  possessed  by  a 
remorseless  candor.  And  it  has  so  far  reacted 
from  a  smug  overemphasis  upon  the  more 
genial  aspects  of  human  experience  that  it  has 
seemed  to  develop  a  sort  of  selective  instinct 
for  the  sordid  and  the  hectic  and  the  heart¬ 
lessly  selfish.  A  cynic  might  be  tempted  to 
say  that  sometimes  the  same  spirit  has  un¬ 
consciously  entered  into  architecture  and  has 
led  to  the  erection  of  buildings  of  scientific 
and  consummate  ugliness.  The  value  of  the 
sense  of  beauty  as  candor  has  lain  just  in  the 
fact  of  its  apotheosis  of  honesty,  though  when 
the  selective  process  has  inclined  with  perti¬ 
nacity  toward  the  evil  the  simon  pure  quality 
of  that  honesty  itself  has  perhaps  suffered  in 
quality.  Wherever  this  sort  of  realism  has 
come  it  has  sooner  or  later  led  to  a  reaction. 
And  so  curious  is  the  history  of  these  things 
that  without  desiring  to  be  too  paradoxical 
we  may  perhaps  say  that  sometimes  the  reac¬ 
tion  has  come  before  the  most  characteristic 
expression  of  the  thing  against  which  the  re¬ 
action  set  in.  It  is  extremely  interesting  to 
find  Rousseau  insisting  on  going  back  to  na¬ 
ture  and  then  finding  at  the  end  of  the  quest  as 
purely  imaginary  and  romantic  a  creature  as 


106  SYNTHETIC  CHRISTIANITY 


ever  haunted  the  mind  of  man.  At  all  events 
over  against  the  realistic  movement  we  find 
the  romantic  movement  appearing  again  and 
again.  The  more  complete  the  temporary 
victory  of  a  sordid  realism  the  surer  the  com¬ 
ing  of  an  ethereal  romance.  The  mid-Vic- 
torian  era  in  poetry  is  a  good  illustration  of 
certain  aspects  of  the  Romantic  movement  in 
its  larger  relationships.  Wordsworth,  with  all 
the  shrewd,  quiet  observation  which  is  so  dis¬ 
tant  from  the  fiercely  romantic  rhetoric  of 
Byron,  did  at  last  read  into  nature  what  only 
the  glowing  spirit  of  a  great  dreamer  could 
ever  put  there.  When  he  made  nature  him¬ 
self  he  made  it  Romantic.  Tennyson  allowed 
his  music  to  run  away  with  his  sense  of 
actuality  again  and  again,  and  despite  the 
fact  that  he  could  talk  musically  about  mod¬ 
ern  science  and  the  deepest  matters  which 
move  the  spirit  of  man,  he  had  at  heart  the 
Romantic  outlook.  To  be  sure,  life  had 
become  very  highly  articulated  by  the  time  the 
mid- Victorians  arrived,  and  many  forces  go 
to  make  up  their  complex  and  varied  art.  But 
that  Romantic  movement  which  had  such 
brilliant  expression  on  the  Continent  still 
moved  masterfully  among  the  new  forces,  and 
just  because  it  entered  into  such  complex  re¬ 
lationships  proved  its  vitality.  In  Dante 


TRIUMPHANT  BEAUTY 


10T 


Gabriel  Rossetti  yon  seem  very  near  to  the 
finest  essence  of  the  Romantic  movement  as 
an  escape  from  the  hard  and  sordid  into 
realms  of  supremely  delicate  loveliness.  “The 
Blessed  Damosel”  is  a  translation  into  words 
of  the  very  quality  of  its  poignant  and  im¬ 
palpable  charm.  The  tragedy  of  the  Romantic 
mood  is  just  the  danger  that  it  will  descend 
into  a  sweetness  which  is  cloying  because  it 
evades  much  of  the  actual  tang  of  life  by  its 
own  deft  and  skillful  legerdemain  and  pro¬ 
duces  a  world  of  subtly  sophisticated  feeling 
which  is  further  and  further  removed  from  the 
reality  of  things.  So  the  mid- Victorians  have 
come  into  a  vast  disrepute  and  their  great 
virtues  are  lost  to  the  thought  of  a  good  many 
people  who  can  think  only  of  one  vice  which 
they  particularly  despise.  There  is  a  good 
deal  of  difference  between  the  art  which  is  an 
escape  from  life  and  the  art  which  is  a  mastery 
of  life.  And  below  the  art  which  is  an  escape 
from  life  is  the  art  which  is  an  evasion  of 
life.  Sincere  men  cannot  be  contented  perma¬ 
nently  to  live  in  a  world  of  artificial  emotions 
arising  from  the  appropriation  of  not  quite 
honest  experiences.  Then  the  Romantic  mood 
in  all  its  forms  lends  itself  with  a  sort  of  fatal 
ease  to  the  use  of  the  man  who  has  mastered 
its  passwords  without  ever  feeling  its  really 


108  SYNTHETIC  CHRISTIANITY 


authentic  quality.  A  good  many  of  the  films 
to  be  seen  on  the  screen  in  our  big  towns  and 
little  Tillages  to-day  represent  a  clever 
attempt  to  arouse  and  gratify  feelings  which 
the  producer  of  the  scenario  and  the  makers 
of  the  pictures  regard  with  a  quite  cynical 
aloofness.  The  exploitation  of  the  emotions 
has  always  represented  a  particularly  tragic 
sort  of  commercialism.  And  in  the  process  the 
Romantic  motive  becomes  thinner  and  thinner 
and  finally  loses  all  semblance  of  reality. 
So  the  day  conies  when  jaded  audiences  find 
temporary  satisfaction  in  the  sort  of  picture 
which  gives  respite  to  the  soulless  spectator 
who  has  been  trying  to  feel  as  if  he  had  a  soul 
by  frankly  speaking  to  his  body,  which  there 
is  no  doubt  in  the  world  he  does  possess. 

In  this  whole  situation  you  come  upon  a 
tragedy  whose  meaning  reaches  deeply  into 
the  philosophy  of  art.  You  find  depleted  per¬ 
sonalities  trying  to  rouse  feelings  which  can 
come  only  to  personalities  which  are  intensely 
alive.  Real  decadence  in  art  arrives  in  many 
nations  and  in  many  periods  just  at  the  point 
of  this  experience.  It  is  all  a  very  subtle 
process,  for,  of  course,  the  nation  which  is 
bleeding  to  death  never  recognizes  its  loss  of 
blood.  It  revises  its  standards.  It  ceases  to 
admire  the  robust  virtues  because  it  no  longer 


TKIUMPHANT  BEAUTY 


109 


practices  them.  It  ceases  to  believe  in  those 
intuitions  which  come  only  with  health.  It 
quite  unconsciously  lowers  its  taste  to  meet 
the  quality  of  its  actual  life.  It  develops 
noisy  apostles  who  declare  that  now  at  last  a 
genuine  insight  into  the  nature  of  beauty  has 
arrived.  These  men  mistake  their  own  deca¬ 
dent  enthusiasms  for  the  love  of  beauty,  and 
they  condemn  all  the  enthusiasms  which  their 
devitalized  personalities  are  incapable  of 
sharing.  Of  course  the  whole  movement  goes 
much  deeper  than  a  reaction  from  artificial 
romance  should  go.  As  a  matter  of  fact,  when 
a  nation  is  keenly  alive  it  finds  its  own  way 
from  artificial  romance  to  a  romance  based 
upon  the  eternal  mental  and  moral  and 
spiritual  adventures  of  the  human  spirit.  It 
is  a  civilization  whose  own  life  is  depleted 
which  finds  no  way  out  of  the  debacle  but  to 
change  its  standards  of  taste  in  accordance 
with  the  subtle  disintegration  of  its  life.  Many 
a  critic  mistakes  a  mind  which  is  in  a  com¬ 
pletely  pathological  state  for  a  mind  rejoicing 
in  the  ripe  fruits  of  intellectual  emancipation. 
And  there  is  a  good  deal  of  criticism  which 
is  merely  the  attempt  of  disease  germs  to 
propagate  themselves.  As  this  process  goes 
on  all  the  slowly  evolved  sanctions  of  civiliza¬ 
tion  are  one  by  one  tossed  aside  by  men  who 


110  SYNTHETIC  CHRISTIANITY 


find  in  the  keen  fury  of  destruction  a  sense 
that  life  is  vivid  and  full.  You  can  always 
keep  warm  if  you  stand  just  near  enough  to 
a  burning  house.  But  if  the  house  is  your 
own,  the  aftermath  may  not  be  entirely  agree¬ 
able.  There  may  be  some  question  about  the 
permanent  satisfactions  coming  from  that 
genial  warmth  which  subtly  steals  over  the 
feelings  when  we  stand  at  just  the  right  spot 
while  the  structure  of  moral  and  spiritual 
sanctions  burns  before  our  eyes.  The  sensa¬ 
tions  are  no  doubt  very  pleasant  while  they 
last  but  there  is  just  a  little  question  as  to 
their  permanence.  No  doubt  many  things 
which  ought  to  be  destroyed  do  become  con¬ 
sumed  in  the  holocaust  of  the  moral  experi¬ 
ence  of  the  race.  But,  after  all,  burning  down 
the  house  is  not  just  the  very  best  sort  of  sub¬ 
stitute  for  the  spring  house-cleaning.  So  the 
love  of  beauty  as  decadence  is,  after  all,  a 
good  deal  like  the  brilliant  beauty  of  the  eye 
and  the  shining  glow  of  the  face  of  a  patient 
in  full  possession  of  tuberculosis.  You  flinch 
just  a  little  as  you  look  at  this  unnatural 
beauty  because  it  is  an  evidence  of  decay  and 
a  prophecy  of  death.  Of  course  disease  is  not 
the  sort  of  thing  you  can  deal  with  finally  by 
argument.  The  processes  by  which  health  is 
restored  justify  themselves  in  the  very  experi- 


TRIUMPHANT  BEAUTY 


111 


ence  of  their  renewing  powers.  And  the  in¬ 
sight  of  health  has  a  way  of  brushing  aside  all 
the  hectic  assertions  of  diseased  souls  and 
moving  out  in  the  clean  air  and  the  clear  sun¬ 
light  for  the  really  creative  thinking  and  feel¬ 
ing  and  activity  of  the  world. 

In  the  meantime  in  every  age  where  deca¬ 
dence  is  mistaken  for  beauty  a  number  of 
things  happen.  In  one  group  at  one  stage  of 
the  process  there  arises  a  sense  of  beauty  as 
urbane  cynicism.  You  do  not  need  to  read  far 
into  The  Way  of  All  Fleshy  by  Samuel  Butler, 
to  feel  in  the  presence  of  a  mood  which  finds 
a  certain  artistic  delight  in  the  clear  and 
cynical  analysis  of  the  weaknesses  of  men. 
With  infinitely  delicate  distinction  this  mood 
is  expressed  in  such  a  bit  of  writing  as  Mr. 
Galsworthy’s  Patrician.  With  a  good  deal  of 
crude  power  the  same  sort  of  thing  is  found 
in  the  waitings  of  Mr.  Sinclair  Lewis.  Some¬ 
times,  as  at  an  earlier  day,  you  have  a  mood 
of  terrible  wrath  which  pours  itself  forth  in 
brilliant  and  corrosive  writing  like  that  which 
came  from  the  pen  of  Dean  Swift.  Sometimes 
you  have  the  attempt  of  the  artist  to  lose  him¬ 
self  in  the  hot  intensity  of  the  passionate 
human  story,  a  mood  to  be  found  in  Balzac. 
Sometimes  you  find  art  used  as  a  means  of 
attack.  Here  emerge  the  long  line  of  artists 


112  SYNTHETIC  CHRISTIANITY 


of  revolt  typified  sufficiently  well  by  the  mas¬ 
sive  achievement  in  letters  of  Victor  Hugo. 
Then  there  comes  a  period  when  many  men 
utterly  unhappy  and  morbid  and  conscious  of 
a  complete  lack  of  inspiration  in  the  existing 
forms  of  expression  invent  wild,  new  forms. 
Cubism  and  Futurism  in  painting  and  the 
freakish  forms  of  free  verse  emerge,  the  per¬ 
fect  expression  of  aesthetic  bankruptcy  hiding 
its  penury  from  its  own  eyes  by  new  and  fan¬ 
tastic  theories  of  beauty  and  of  its  expression 
in  art.  In  all  these  types  of  confusion  emerg¬ 
ing  in  so  many  ages  in  the  wake  of  so  many 
types  of  disillusionment,  there  are  bits  of  pure 
gold  in  the  midst  of  the  folly  and  the  futility 
and  the  lawlessness  which  would  disguise  it¬ 
self  as  beauty.  And  by  and  by  some  artist 
of  calm  poise  and  wide  outlook  and  robust 
moral  and  spiritual  health  comes  along  and 
incorporates  the  vital  elements  in  these  move¬ 
ments  in  a  sure  and  strong  synthesis  which 
has  all  the  elements  of  permanent  beauty. 

When  you  study  the  romantic  movements 
and  their  antithetical  expressions  you  come  at 
last  to  have  a  very  definite  sense  of  good  to 
be  conserved  and  of  evil  to  be  avoided  in  each 
group.  If  you  take  the  pure  high  passion  of 
Tennyson’s  Romanticism  at  its  best,  how 
much  it  contains  which  has  elements  of  per- 


TRIUMPHANT  BEAUTY 


113 


manent  loveliness!  And  at  the  same  time 
how  frankly  you  have  to  admit  that  once  and 
again  the  glowing  beauty  seems  to  be  moving 
from  actual  experience  rather  than  toward  the 
reality  of  this  human  world !  If  yon  study  the 
output  of  the  vigorous  young  intellectuals 
who  represent  the  new  poetic  movements  in 
our  own  day,  you  have  a  terribly  fascinating 
honesty,  a  use  of  the  concrete  and  brittle  and 
descriptive  word  which  fills  you  with  aston¬ 
ished  pleasure.  And  at  the  same  time  you 
often  find  a  complete  lack  of  contact  with  any 
deep  and  ultimately  creative  passion.  You  have 
the  skillful  and  wistful  and  distinguished  dis¬ 
illusionment  which  is  expressed  with  such 
subtle  finality  in  the  writings  of  Edwin 
Arlington  Robinson,  the  perfect  and  soulless 
technique  of  Amy  Lowell’s  Patterns.  All  the 
while  you  feel  more  intensely  that  these  vigor¬ 
ous  contemporary  writers  have  something  we 
must  incorporate  and  lack  something  we  must 
regain.  Then  you  turn  to  Robert  Browning 
and,  by  one  of  those  curious  anachronisms 
not  impossible  in  art,  you  find  that  in  the 
heart  of  the  mid- Victorian  period  he  reacted 
from  the  cloyingly  sweet  as  definitely  as  any 
of  the  young  intellectuals  of  our  own  time. 
He  too  learned  how  to  use  the  hard  and  con¬ 
crete  word  whose  brittle  power  captured  the 


114  SYNTHETIC  CHRISTIANITY 


rigid  intensity  of  a  situation  before  it  was 
dissolved  after  the  fashion  of  those  changing 
scenes  which  make  up  life’s  phantasmagoria. 
He  knew  the  secrets  of  the  imagists  before  the 
imagists  were  born.  He  anticipated  the 
qualities  of  the  movement  which  is  so  noisily 
vocal  and  so  easily  sure  of  itself  in  our  own 
day.  But  he  did  something  else.  He  main¬ 
tained  that  deep  and  creative  passion,  that 
sense  of  eternal  loveliness  which  breaks  out 
in  such  lyric  magnificence  in  the  best  writ¬ 
ings  of  Alfred  Tennyson.  He  kept  the  eternal 
spirit  which  glows  at  the  heart  of  all  healthy 
Romanticism  and  appropriated,  before  it  had 
come  to  make  a  noise  in  the  world  and  to 
establish  a  new  school  of  poetry,  that  cutting 
honesty,  that  fearless  bending  of  form  to  its 
own  purposes  which  is  at  the  heart  of  the 
revolutionary  experiments  of  our  own  day. 
The  living  elements  of  Romanticism  are  all 
found  in  Browning.  He  is  completely  saved 
from  the  cloying  sweetness  and  artificiality 
which  has  sometimes  disfigured  it.  He  is  al¬ 
ways  in  contact  with  the  facts  and  the 
experiences  of  actual  life.  He  incarnates  the 
very  spirit  which  created  free  verse,  yet  he 
maintains  the  enthusiasm  and,  when  he  will, 
the  methods  which  gave  glory  to  the  best 
poetic  art  of  his  own  time.  He  is  a  sort  of 


TRIUMPHANT  BEAUTY 


115 


living  synthesis  born  out  of  due  time.  In  fifty 
or  a  hundred  years,  when  the  movement  of  art 
itself  has  caught  up  with  him,  we  shall  realize 
his  significance. 

But  the  moment  we  have  said  these  things 
about  Robert  Browning  we  remember  that  he 
was  in  a  definite  and  amazing  sense  a  Chris¬ 
tian  poet.  I  mean  something  very  much 
deeper  than  that  he  wrote  in  “Saul,”  “See  the 
Christ  stand.”  I  mean  something  very  much 
profounder  than  that  he  wrote  in  “The  Death 
in  the  Desert,”  “That  life  that  death  accepted 
by  thy  reason  solves  for  thee  all  questions  in 
the  earth  and  out  of  it.”  I  mean  that  the 
fundamental  presuppositions  of  his  art  grow 
out  of  the  fundamental  insights  of  the  Chris¬ 
tian  faith.  His  instinctive  reactions  in  the 
presence  of  great  problems  and  great  experi¬ 
ences  are  those  which  rise  instinctively  to  a 
man  whose  inner  consciousness  is  steeped  in 
the  essential  qualities  of  the  Christian  re¬ 
ligion.  It  is  not  without  significance  that  the 
most  synthetic  artist  in  the  creation  of  great 
poetry  in  the  last  hundred  years  was  thus  in 
the  profoundest  contact  with  the  genius  of 
the  Christian  faith.  It  comes  to  mean  just 
this  when  we  have  fully  apprehended  its  impli¬ 
cations.  The  faith  which  had  such  a  place  in 
the  deepest  thought  and  feeling  of  the  poet 


116  SYNTHETIC  CHRISTIANITY 


has  just  the  synthetic  qualities  which  he  him¬ 
self  expressed.  Christianity  too  has  its 
eternal  blaze  of  high  moral  and  spiritual 
romance.  But  it  also  quickly  reacts  from  the 
artificial,  the  dishonest,  the  cloyingly  sweet. 
The  Old-Testament  literature,  itself  repre¬ 
senting  a  period  before  Jesus  had  walked  the 
earth,  is  a  series  of  pieces  of  writing  whose 
honesty  and  candor  is  one  of  the  most  amazing 
things  the  reader  confronts.  You  see  the 
spots  on  every  one  of  its  heroes.  No  modern 
decadent  writer  is  more  terribly  frank  than 
the  writers  of  the  Old  Testament.  But  there 
is  this  difference.  Modern  decadence  has 
plenty  of  frankness  and  little  soul.  The  soul 
of  beauty,  the  soul  of  love,  the  soul  of  right¬ 
eousness  shine  out  all  the  more  resplendently 
in  this  literature  of  amazing  frankness.  And 
there  is  this  difference.  The  Old-Testament 
writers  tell  all  the  ugly  truth,  but  they  never 
roll  it  under  their  lips  as  if  it  gave  them  a 
rapturous  delight.  Their  spirits  are  unsoiled 
by  all  the  evil  and  sordid  facts  which  they 
must  face.  They  have  found  some  inner  secret 
of  cleanness  even  when  they  must  deal  with 
slime.  Remorseless  honesty  and  all  the  per¬ 
fect  romance  of  spiritual  beauty  dwell  side  by 
side  in  the  writings  of  the  Old  Testament. 

The  character  of  Jesus  gives  you  at  once 


TRIUMPHANT  BEAUTY 


117 


and  with  your  continued  study  an  increasing 
consciousness  of  complete  moral  honesty. 
Nothing  escapes  him.  He  sees  everything.  He 
takes  everything  into  account.  He  knows  all 
that  is  in  the  human  heart.  There  is  no  over¬ 
wrought  emotion,  there  is  no  artificial  feel¬ 
ing,  but  there  is  the  most  perfect  uniting  of 
candor  and  spiritual  enthusiasm.  He  shocks 
his  disciples  by  his  realism.  He  can  find  a 
blunt  phrase,  “that  fox,”  to  describe  a  man 
whose  portrait  is  perfectly  painted  in  that 
one  word.  But  out  of  the  depths  of  what  his 
disciples  dimly  felt  to  be  a  terrible  disillusion¬ 
ment  as  they  stood  baffled  and  perplexed  by 
his  words,  he  lifted  the  perfect  and  splendid 
enthusiasm  which  glowed  with  all  the  beauty 
of  the  rising  sun.  He  was  himself  a  synthesis 
of  that  spiritual  adventure  which  is  the  very 
center  of  romance  and  that  ruthless  candor 
which  faces  the  last  and  terrible  and  ugly 
fact.  It  is  not  less  true  that  this  ideal  has 
haunted  the  historic  church.  Sometimes  one 
element  has  temporarily  triumphed  over  the 
other.  Sometimes  both  have  seemed  lost  in 
the  adroitness  of  scheming  ecclesiastics.  But 
the  ideals  of  the  deathless  romance  of  spiritual 
endeavor  and  the  terrible  honesty  of  the  awak¬ 
ened  mind  have  always  been  at  the  heart  of 
the  Christian  faith,  always  ready  to  break 


118  SYNTHETIC  CHRISTIANITY 


forth  with  vital  energy  to  search  and  quicken 
and  renew  the  life  of  man. 

As  long  ago  as  Plotinus  in  the  third  century 
A.  D.,  the  suggestion  was  made  that  beauty  is 
essentially  the  spiritual  shining  through  the 
material.  The  thought  of  an  ultimate  reality 
whose  gracious  loveliness  is  all  the  while  at¬ 
tempting  to  work  through  the  materials  of 
this  world  and  the  forms  of  its  experience  is 
one  of  those  seminal  ideas  which  is  sure  to 
return  again  and  again  to  kindle  the  mind  of 
man.  One  form  in  which  it  may  express  it¬ 
self  is  in  the  conception  of  a  universal  experi¬ 
ence  which  underlies  all  the  varied  aspects  of 
our  individual  lives.  From  this  standpoint 
art  may  easily  be  viewed  as  the  expression  of 
the  universal.  When  this  conception  of 
beauty  arises  men  will  emphasize  all  those 
deep  and  unifying  aspects  of  experience  and 
all  those  profound  intuitions  which  unite  men 
in  a  vast  spiritual  organism.  It  is  easy  to  see 
that  music  lends  itself  particularly  to  this 
attitude  toward  the  beautiful.  In  one  way 
you  come  nearer  to  pure  beauty  in  music  than 
anywhere  else.  The  contingent  seems  lost  in 
the  essential.  Men  do  not  have  to  understand 
the  same  language  in  order  to  appreciate  the 
same  music.  They  do  not  have  to  hold  the 
same  ideas  to  be  moved  by  the  same  lovely 


TRIUMPHANT  BEAUTY 


119 


sounds.  They  can  be  separated  by  race  and 
custom  and  all  sorts  of  opinions  and  still  bend 
before  the  majesty  of  the  same  glorious  music. 
One  cannot  fail  to  see  a  connection  between 
the  recurring  hungry  desire  for  a  common 
meeting  place  where  all  individual  elements 
find  their  deeper  meaning  and  the  universal 
qualities  of  the  greatest  music  of  the  world. 
It  is  significant  too  that  the  very  period  when 
German  idealism  was  seeking  to  transcend 
individual  differences  on  the  philosophical 
side  was  the  period  of  a  most  tremendous  out¬ 
burst  of  immortal  music.  In  all  the  arts  the 
same  principle  can  be  expressed.  When  we 
transcend  the  individual  and  find  the  typical 
we  are  expressing  beauty  in  the  terms  of  the 
interpretation  of  the  lovely  as  the  universal. 

When  we  go  once  more  to  the  portrait  of 
Jesus  in  the  Gospels  we  are  astonished  to  find 
just  this  note  of  universality  which  we  have 
been  studying  as  related  to  the  art  impulse. 
It  is  not  surprising  that  the  artists  of  many 
lands  have  painted  his  face  and  figure  in  the 
very  terms  of  their  national  qualities.  That 
is  just  the  impression  which  he  makes  upon 
you.  He  belongs  to  all  lands.  He  belongs  to 
all  peoples.  With  the  most  easy  naturalness, 
he  transcends  the  provincial  and  the  limited 
aspects  of  life.  Everybody  can  understand 


120  SYNTHETIC  CHRISTIANITY 


him  because  he  speaks  to  a  universal  con¬ 
sciousness  in  a  universal  language.  You  are 
all  the  while  feeling  as  you  study  his  life  that 
you  have  passed  the  incidental  and  have  come 
to  the  essential  in  humanity.  “Behold  the 
Man”  expresses  the  very  quality  of  his  per¬ 
sonality  with  its  universal  appeal.  Only  a 
cosmopolitan  religion  can  become  a  universal 
religion.  And  the  inherent  nature  of  the 
Christian  religion  presses  it  out  to  the 
farthest  boundaries  of  human  life  to  the  com- 
pletest  service  of  the  race.  When  it  is  fully 
self-conscious,  it  does  not  attempt  to  make 
modern  men  of  the  West  of  its  converts.  It 
releases  inspirations  and  energies  which  help 
men  of  every  race  and  of  every  clime  to  fulfill 
the  potencies  of  their  own  national  and  racial 
and  individual  genius  in  such  a  way  that 
their  lives  are  all  the  while  receiving  sus¬ 
tenance  from  the  universal  ideals  and  prin¬ 
ciples  which  transcend  all  individual  dif¬ 
ferences.  If  beauty  is  the  universal  shining 
through  the  particular,  Christianity  has  the 
closest  kinship  with  its  operations,  for  Chris¬ 
tianity  too  is  the  universal  bringing  the 
individual  to  fullest  life  at  the  very  moment 
when  he  is  lifted  above  individual  limitations. 

Closely  related  in  its  own  way  to  the  inter¬ 
pretation  of  which  we  have  been  speaking  is 


TRIUMPHANT  BEAUTY 


121 


the  thought  of  beauty  as  the  expression  of 
that  mastery  of  things  by  ideas  which  is  the 
goal  of  life.  The  idea  is  all  the  while  in  proc¬ 
ess  in  one  way  or  another  of  bending  material 
forms  to  its  purposes.  Its  complete  victory  is 
that 

“.  .  .  far-off  divine  event 
Toward  which  the  whole  creation  moves.” 

Art  is  a  prophecy  of  this  victory.  It  is  a 
symbol  and  an  expression  of  its  meaning. 
Hegel  worked  out  this  sort  of  conception  in 
his  aesthetic  studies,  classifying  the  arts  ac¬ 
cording  to  their  capacity  for  a  more  or  less 
perfect  expression  of  this  conception  of  the 
mastery  of  the  thing  by  the  idea.  The  thought 
of  art  as  the  perpetual  challenge  of  the  ideal 
has  never  been  far  from  the  minds  of  the 
greatest  artists,  though  sometimes  it  has  been 
a  deep  and  almost  unconscious  assumption 
and  sometimes  it  has  been  clearly  present  in 
self-consciousness.  Men  of  all  periods  and  of 
the  most  varied  attitudes  have  had  their 
splendid  flashes  of  inspiration  when  they  have 
seen  beauty  as  an  eternal  thing  whose  ideal 
reality  is  a  perpetual  challenge  to  the  mind 
and  heart  of  man.  All  this  owes  a  tremen¬ 
dous  part  of  its  power  to  the  philosophy  of 
Plato,  who  set  forth  principles  which  lend 
themselves  to  a  perpetual  aesthetic  inspira- 


122  SYNTHETIC  CHRISTIANITY 


tion.  A  poet  like  Shelley,  whose  writing  is 
almost  more  like  music  than  speech,  gives  you 
this  sense  of  an  ideal  world  fully  regnant  in 
its  own  rights,  a  world  whose  reality  is  sure 
and  whose  potency  is  final.  Keats  seems  to 
enter  the  very  beatific  loveliness  of  the  king¬ 
dom  of  beauty  itself  as  he  turns  human  speech 
into  an  instrument  of  transcendent  delicacy 
and  charm.  With  Matthew  Arnold  there  is 
a  somber  passionate  sadness  with  its  own 
strange  secrets  of  self-control  and  of  chaste 
and  disciplined  expression.  But  all  the  while 
above  the  misanthropy  clothed  in  lovely 
words  is  that  sense  of  a  serene  and  beautiful 
ideal  which  lies  like  a  golden  sunset  beyond 
human  perplexity  and  human  pain. 

One  does  not  need  to  use  much  time  in 
speaking  of  the  relation  of  Christianity  to  this 
whole  circle  of  ideas,  for  Christianity  is  essen¬ 
tially  the  ideal  coming  into  the  most  definite 
contact  with  the  real.  It  is  the  perpetual 
challenge  of  the  ideal  as  it  confronts  the 
actual.  But  where  too  often  art  turns  to  an 
autumnal  beauty  of  sad  melancholy  when  it 
brings  the  two  together,  Christianity  is  full  of 
the  most  robust  courage,  of  the  most  dauntless 
optimism  as  it  trails  the  splendors  of  the  ideal 
along  the  ways  of  the  actual.  Where  art  is  a 
challenge  Christianity  becomes  a  conquest. 


TRIUMPHANT  BEAUTY 


123 


There  is  no  end  of  other  things  which 
might  be  said  about  men’s  thought  of  beauty. 
There  is  the  recall  of  men  to  a  beauty  which  is 
good  and  a  goodness  which  is  beautiful  with 
a  brilliant  apostle  like  Ruskin,  who  began  to 
have  the  insight  so  eagerly  expressed  by  Wil¬ 
liam  Morris,  that  life  itself  must  be  made  a 
beautiful  art  if  art  is  to  remain  a  sincere 
beauty  in  life.  There  is  the  pouring  of  the 
whole  artistic  impulse  into  the  social  passion, 
and  the  realizing  that  only  a  society  whose 
life  is  beautiful  can  ultimately  produce  the 
things  of  beauty  which  represent  the  final 
triumph  of  art.  There  is  the  protest  against 
a  self-conscious  ethical  element  in  art  which 
robs  beauty  of  spontaneousness  and  gracious 
charm.  There  is  the  deep  ethical  passion 
which  insists  that  art  should  be  the  Ten  Com¬ 
mandments  set  to  music.  There  are  all  the 
varied  insights  held  with  such  enthusiasm  that 
each  has  been  ready  to  call  itself  a  theory  of 
beauty  or  a  fundamental  sanction  in  the  realm 
of  art. 

One  or  two  matters,  however,  do  deserve  our 
attention.  It  is  clear  as  we  move  through  the 
noise  and  contention  of  varied  interpretations 
that  art  is  related  to  the  invisible  and  also  to 
the  material.  It  is  the  place  where  the 
physical  and  the  spiritual  meet.  Now  we  can 


124  SYNTHETIC  CHRISTIANITY 


interpret  all  the  higher  aspects  from  below, 
endeavoring  to  make  the  subtlest  spiritual 
grace  the  by-product  of  some  such  thing  as 
the  sex  instinct.  Or  we  may  interpret  all  the 
physical  aspects  with  their  unmoralized  and 
unspiritualized  intensity  as  on  the  way  to  the 
recognition  of  moral  authority  and  spiritual 
sovereignty.  We  can  interpret  the  higher  in 
the  terms  of  the  lower  and  draw  it  down  to  a 
low  level.  Or  we  may  interpret  the  lower  in 
the  terms  of  the  higher  and  lift  it  up  to  a  high 
level.  It  is  clear  at  least  that  in  the  presence 
of  this  problem  Christianity  does  not  hesitate. 
It  looks  all  the  facts  in  the  face.  It  analyzes 
the  situation  with  complete  candor.  And  it 
sees  all  the  facts  in  the  light  of  the  highest 
fact  which  comes  within  its  ken.  And  so  it 
preserves  the  integrity  of  its  candid  eye  and 
the  glory  of  its  inspiring  spirit. 

And  when  your  art  critic  like  Ruskin,  with 
a  passion  for  making  life  the  finest  and  most 
beautiful  art  of  all,  lifts  his  prophetic  voice, 
Christianity  at  once  recognizes  a  friendly 
spirit.  He  is  an  ally  in  the  great  battle  of  the 
world,  for  Christianity  itself  is  never  content 
until  its  highest  insight  and  its  rarest  intui¬ 
tion  become  a  matter  of  human  experience 
and  so  enter  into  the  very  warp  and  woof  of 
life  itself.  When  life  is  the  realization  of 


TRIUMPHANT  BEAUTY 


125 


beauty,  then  all  the  arts  will  come  to  new 
power.  A  depleted  life  will  mean  a  depleted 
art.  And  the  art  of  living  lies  at  the  root  of 
all  artistic  excellence. 

Here  we  come  upon  that  strange  doctrine 
that  the  lawless  spirit  is  the  creative  spirit. 
Mr.  H.  L.  Menken  has  spoken  with  haughty 
scorn  of  that  type  of  life  which  he  is  inclined 
always  to  associate  with  the  old  moralities  as 
unproductive  of  the  artistic  impulse  and  the 
artistic  performance.  It  is  true  enough  that 
a  conventional  allegiance  to  great  ideals  never 
produces  great  art.  Nor  does  it  produce  great 
living.  But  when  the  moral  and  spiritual 
sanctions  become  a  passion  in  the  blood,  you 
produce  Dante’s  Divine  Comedy ,  and  Bun- 
yan’s  Pilgrim’s  Progress ,  and  Raphael’s  “Sis- 
tine  Madonna,”  and  all  the  heavenly  beauty 
of  the  greatest  music  in  the  world.  When  the 
Christian  life  is  a  make-believe,  it  inspires 
nobody.  When  it  is  a  convention,  there  is 
nothing  creative  about  it.  When  the  tides  of 
its  power  possess  the  soul,  it  has  all  the  seeds 
of  the  greatest  art.  It  is  the  power  to  renew 
the  art  as  well  as  the  life  of  the  world. 

And  the  beauty  which  is  thus  to  create  a 
new  era  is  more  than  the  beauty  of  honesty 
and  sincerity  and  earnestness,  though  it  in¬ 
cludes  all  these.  It  is  beauty  triumphant.  It 


126  SYNTHETIC  CHRISTIANITY 


is  beauty  which  has  caught  the  coutagion  of 
the  moral  and  spiritual  victory  of  Jesus  and 
moves  out  with  regal  energy  upon  the  world. 
Whitsunday  is  the  birthday  of  the  arts  as  well 
as  the  birthday  of  the  saints,  for  Whitsunday 
is  the  festival  of  Christianity  with  the  light 
of  victory  in  its  eye  and  the  joy  of  victory  in 
its  heart. 

The  truth  is  that  only  the  most  joyous  and 
triumphant  kind  of  art  strikes  the  very  high¬ 
est  quality  of  beauty.  There  is  much  which 
has  a  real  loveliness  upon  other  planes.  But 
art  comes  to  its  own  when  all  the  triumphant 
energies  of  a  unified  life  are  applied  to  its 
tasks.  And  the  singing  joy  of  triumphant  life 
becomes  the  haunting  and  immortal  beauty  of 
triumphant  music;  the  exquisite  texture  of 
words  wrought  into  a  lyric  gladness  whose 
heart  almost  breaks  with  the  glory  of  victory ; 
the  shining  whiteness  of  a  sculptured  triumph 
which  makes  marble  itself  sing  and  shout ;  the 
manifold  beauty  of  a  painting  which  bends 
all  the  colors  to  the  symphony  on  the  canvas, 
which  fairly  turns  eyes  into  ears  so  that  you 
fancy  you  can  hear  the  song  which  the  picture 
is  singing;  the  harmony  and  strength  of  build¬ 
ings  whose  every  line  expresses  vitality  and 
power  and  the  supremacy  of  intellectual  and 
moral  and  spiritual  ideals.  The  final  synthesis 


TRIUMPHANT  BEAUTY 


127 


which  Christianity  has  it  in  its  heart  to  give 
to  the  world  of  beauty  is  that  inspiration  to 
manifold  and  yet  harmonious  productiveness 
which  comes  from  the  sweeping  in  upon  life 
itself  of  all  the  creative  energies  of  tri¬ 
umphant  goodness  and  ethical  and  spiritual 
joy. 


LECTURE  IV 


TRIUMPHANT  BROTHERHOOD 

Humanity  is  not  simply  a  lonely  man  with 
an  infinitely  hungry  soul.  Humanity  is  a 
group  of  men  and  women  and  little  children 
with  a  corporate  as  well  as  an  individual  life. 
And  one  of  the  two  or  three  fundamental  prob¬ 
lems  has  to  do  just  with  the  art  of  learning 
to  live  together  which  confronts  the  in¬ 
habitants  of  this  world.  The  moment  the  man 
Friday  is  discovered  on  the  desert  island 
Robinson  Crusoe  has  a  social  problem.  He 
himself  is  a  different  man  because  of  the  pres¬ 
ence  of  the  man  Friday.  New  thoughts  move 
through  his  mind.  Old  thoughts  take  on  new 
color.  All  life  has  become  subtly  different. 
So  all  the  while  a  process  of  mutual  modifica¬ 
tion  is  going  on  in  the  world.  In  remote  and 
isolated  and  primitive  communities  the  task 
has  a  relative  simplicity.  In  highly  developed 
and  thoroughly  articulated  civilizations  the 
tasks  assume  proportions  of  almost  endless 
complexity  and  difficulty.  The  moment  the 
problem  of  organization  arises  you  have  the 

128 


TRIUMPHANT  BROTHERHOOD  129 


assurance  that  a  new  stage  of  civilization  has 
been  reached.  And  in  a  measure  you  may 
judge  the  quality  and  the  success  of  a  civiliza¬ 
tion  by  its  skill  in  dealing  with  this  problem. 
Exchange  of  thoughts  and  things,  of  ideals 
and  plans  is  essential  to  a  highly  developed 
and  achieving  life.  The  laws  of  the  exchange, 
the  methods  of  give  and  take,  the  capacity  for 
mutual  surrender  in  the  name  of  an  ampler 
life  are  structural  in  the  consciousness  and  in 
the  activity  of  the  races  which  define  for  us 
the  meaning  of  civilization. 

When  we  meet  the  first  great  empires  in 
the  valleys  of  the  Tigris  and  the  Euphrates 
and  in  the  valley  of  the  Nile,  we  come  upon 
an  early  method  of  achieving  organization. 
We  come  upon  a  society  created  through  con¬ 
quest.  Some  groups  are  more  virile  than 
others.  Some  groups  prove  able  to  produce 
men  of  dynamic  personality  and  of  command¬ 
ing  leadership.  Some  races  have  an  unfold¬ 
ing  capacity  for  quick  and  courageous  action. 
Some  develop  leaders  of  military  genius.  And 
so  it  comes  to  pass  that  other  groups  and 
other  peoples  find  themselves  subject  to  them. 
So  Babylon  and  Nineveh  become  the  centers 
of  an  authority  based  upon  conquest,  the 
marts  of  a  world  held  together  by  military 
power.  There  is  a  vast  display  of  wealth. 


130  SYNTHETIC  CHRISTIANITY 


There  is  an  overwhelming  exhibition  of  power. 
The  forceful  man  and  the  forceful  nation  sit 
in  the  place  of  lordship  in  the  world.  And 
as  the  strong  nation  becomes  weak  and  deca¬ 
dent  other  nations  are  ready  to  overwhelm  its 
armies  and  to  take  the  place  of  power.  It  is 
all  an  expression  of  the  law  of  the  jungle 
applied  by  the  keenly  acting  mind  and  the 
strong  fighting  arm  of  man.  Empires  come 
and  empires  go.  There  is  infinite  bloodshed 
and  infinite  agony.  But  out  of  it  all  a  suc¬ 
cession  of  strong  and  effective  organizations 
emerge.  At  first  the  strong  body  seems  more 
important  than  the  strong  mind.  But  with 
the  invention  of  more  and  more  highly  evolved 
implements  of  warfare  the  mind  which  makes 
the  weapon  becomes  more  important  and  the 
hand  which  uses  it  does  not  occupy  the  place 
of  supreme  strategy  any  longer.  The  inven¬ 
tion  of  a  new  weapon  may  change  the  whole 
face  of  civilization.  It  may  make  the  serf  the 
equal  of  the  knight  as  a  fighting  man.  So 
minds  and  hands  combine  to  work  out  the  ever 
more  highly  complicated  organization  of  a 
society  based  upon  conquest.  The  nations  of 
physical  and  intellectual  virility  and  with  the 
moral  qualities  of  persistence  and  stability 
control,  in  their  turn,  the  peoples  of  the 
world.  There  may  be  a  wonderful  develop- 


TRIUMPHANT  BROTHERHOOD  131 


ment  of  gracious  and  beautiful  sanctions.  But 
everything  rests  down  at  last  upon  the  fight¬ 
ing  mind  and  the  fighting  hand.  Society  is 
created  and  it  is  maintained  by  conquest.  Men 
learn  to  live  together  at  the  point  of  the 
sword. 

We  now  come  upon  a  period  when  the 
aspirations  of  society  move  far  beyond  those 
matters  of  personal  prowess  and  organized 
courage  which  have  made  conquest  and  cen¬ 
tralization  possible.  The  love  of  all  sorts 
of  wonderful  things  emerges  in  the  life  of 
man.  Philosophy  is  born.  Art  lifts  its  head. 
Commerce  becomes  more  of  exchange  and  less 
of  piracy.  Literature  begins  to  be  a  thing  of 
beauty.  Ethics  urge  their  sanctions  upon 
ever  enlarging  areas  of  life.  But  it  requires 
leisure  to  discipline  the  mind  and  the  taste 
so  that  a  capacity  for  these  activities  is  pro¬ 
duced.  It  requires  a  class  set  free  from  the  sor¬ 
did  and  grueling  tasks  of  life  to  be  the  think¬ 
ers,  the  artists,  and  the  poets  of  the  world. 
The  fine  flower  of  this  development  comes  in 
fifth-century  Athens.  The  spirit  of  man  ex¬ 
presses  itself  rapturously  in  creating  manifold 
forms  of  beauty  and  in  attacking  the  ultimate 
problems  which  have  to  do  with  the  under¬ 
standing  of  truth.  And  all  of  this  wonderful 
achievement  is  based  upon  slavery.  You  have 


132  SYNTHETIC  CHRISTIANITY 


a  gracious  and  lovely  product  of  noble  think¬ 
ing  and  high  artistic  achievement  which  rests 
down  upon  the  foundation  of  human  servi¬ 
tude.  Some  men  must  be  slaves  in  order  that 
other  men  may  be  free.  Society  as  an  achiev¬ 
ing  civilization  rests  down  upon  slavery.  No¬ 
body  can  deny  the  supreme  loveliness  of  many 
of  the  products  of  this  type  of  organized  life. 
It  created  a  free  spirit  as  well  as  a  marvelous 
mental  and  material  product.  The  tyranny 
had  room  for  a  few  manipulators  of  autocratic 
power.  The  Athenian  democracy  made  room 
for  a  city  of  free  and  keen-thinking  citizens. 
The  area  of  freedom  is  wonderfully  enlarged. 
There  is  a  really  wide  circle  where  men  meet 
as  equals  and  act  as  self-respecting  and  self- 
governing  units  in  a  society  whose  sanctions 
rest  upon  the  will  of  the  citizens.  But  an 
amazing  number  of  people  live  in  Athens  who 
are  not  citizens,  and  an  astounding  number 
of  people  who  bend  under  the  terrible  burden 
of  holding  up  the  whole  structure  of  society 
are  slaves.  There  is  a  dark  and  tragic  dual¬ 
ism  under  all  the  glow  and  beauty  and  charm 
and  unity  of  the  surface  of  Athenian  life. 
Freedom  is  not  a  universal  principle.  It  is 
the  rare  and  high-priced  privilege  of  the  few. 
And  that  freedom  itself  is  at  last  a  freedom 
based  upon  conquest,  a  liberty  based  upon  the 


TRIUMPHANT  BROTHERHOOD  133 


unwilling  service  of  lives  coerced  to  do  the 
bidding  of  a  superior  or,  at  least,  a  more 
powerful  race.  Society  based  upon  slavery  is 
a  wonderfully  interesting  stage  of  human  evo¬ 
lution.  It  cannot  possibly  be  its  goal. 

But  we  are  just  upon  the  edge  of  a  new  sort 
of  human  experiment.  Slavery  still  exists. 
Conquest  is  still  the  most  potent  of  all  of  the 
forces  of  the  world.  But  the  conquest  is  char¬ 
acterized  by  a  new  spirit.  And  slavery  is 
often  modified  and  sometimes  abolished  as  far 
as  particular  individuals  are  concerned.  The 
freedman  becomes  a  recognized  element  in  the 
life  of  the  world.  The  whole  Mediterranean 
basin  is  overwhelmed  by  the  power  of  Rome, 
and  then  that  mighty  power  reaches  out  over 
ever-widening  areas.  There  is  an  ultimate 
and  autocratic  authority.  But  there  is  also 
a  wonderful  practical  capacity  for  compro¬ 
mise.  There  is  a  new  sense  of  a  world-order 
produced  by  a  mingling  of  authority  and  con¬ 
cession  and  not  by  the  hard  and  remorseless 
exercise  of  authority  alone.  The  great  Roman 
administrators  began  to  understand  that 
there  are  millions  of  men  who  will  be  con¬ 
tented  to  lose  their  freedom  if  they  can  keep 
their  comforts,  and  even  that  a  modified  free¬ 
dom  may  give  large  room  for  the  exercise  of 
individual  initiative  so  that  the  man  who  is 


134  SYNTHETIC  CHRISTIANITY 


under  authority  may  yet  develop  large  ele¬ 
ments  of  personal  leadership.  The  Roman 
governor  studied  the  qualities  of  the  people 
over  whom  he  ruled.  He  tried  to  appraise  the 
genius  of  their  racial  and  even  of  their 
national  life.  And  he  adapted  himself  to  these 
things  with  wonderful  practical  skill.  The 
Pax  Romana  was  a  stern  and  iron-ribbed 
thing.  But  in  a  wonderful  way  it  related  it¬ 
self  to  the  habits  and  the  customs  and  often 
to  the  prejudices  of  the  subject  peoples. 
Political  sagacity  took  its  own  place  with  the 
exercise  of  autocratic  power  in  the  ruling  of 
the  world.  The  organized  life  of  man  became 
a  more  human  thing.  Men  began  to  feel  that 
in  a  sense  they  might  come  to  feel  at  home  in 
the  highly  articulated  life  of  a  great  empire 
not  without  its  aspects  of  benevolent  activity. 
To  be  sure,  there  was  exploitation  and  tyranny, 
and  men  fattened  upon  unjust  gains.  But  a 
new  note  had  been  sounded.  And  society  took 
on  a  more  mellow  and  gracious  quality.  Many 
beautiful  vines  grew  over  the  hard  and  solid 
masonry  of  Roman  rule. 

But  the  great  and  world-wide  organism  of 
Roman  life  came  to  its  own  experience  of 
decadence  and  inner  weakness,  and  at  last  it 
fell  apart.  Civilization  itself  seemed  to  have 
come  upon  a  period  of  decay.  The  old  Roman 


TRIUMPHANT  BROTHERHOOD  135 


roads  fell  out  of  repair.  The  old  arts  were 
forgotten.  Travel  became  perilous.  Life  lost 
its  disciplined  and  ordered  quality.  A  new 
period  of  barbarism  came  to  the  Western 
world.  Men  seemed  to  have  forgotten  the  les¬ 
sons  they  had  learned  through  slow  centuries 
of  experience.  They  did  not  know  how  to  live 
together  wisely  or  productively  or  effectively. 
In  the  nature  of  things  such  a  condition  could 
not  continue.  Anarchy  could  not  be  allowed 
to  settle  upon  the  world.  The  resilient  and 
vital  spirit  of  man  began  to  move  in  new  chan¬ 
nels.  A  society  gradually  arose  which  had 
its  own  genius  and  its  own  quality.  Feudal¬ 
ism  spread  over  the  territories  of  Western 
Europe.  And  now  society  was  based  upon  per¬ 
sonal  loyalty.  There  was  a  great  hierarchy 
of  loyalties.  Each  was  bound  with  an  inti¬ 
mate  and  personal  tie.  Together  they  held 
together  the  elements  of  a  life  which  had 
seemed  about  to  fall  apart.  There  were  many 
delightful  aspects  to  the  new  set  of  sanctions. 
The  personal  faithfulness  of  a  warrior  to  his 
chief  took  on  at  its  best  a  quality  of  almost 
religious  devotion,  and  the  sense  of  responsi¬ 
bility  on  the  part  of  the  overlord  for  those 
bound  to  him  by  feudal  vows  was  a  thing  full 
of  noble  beauty  when  a  man  of  genuine  char¬ 
acter  and  a  high  sense  of  his  own  position  held 


136  SYNTHETIC  CHRISTIANITY 


the  place  of  leadership.  There  was  a  vast  net¬ 
work  of  feudal  ties.  They  overlapped  in  the 
most  curious  and  illogical  ways.  They  often 
produced  a  state  of  things  where  efficient  and 
orderly  administration  was  difficult.  Some¬ 
times  they  produced  a  situation  where  it  was 
impossible.  Land  as  well  as  loyalty  had  a 
great  place  in  the  system.  In  return  for  his 
loyalty  the  vassal  received  a  grant  of  land. 
And  so  the  material  possession  and  the  spir¬ 
itual  tie  united  in  the  society  which  the  feudal 
spirit  made  possible.  Flowers  have  a  way  of 
blooming  in  human  institutions  whenever  they 
have  any  sort  of  opportunity.  And  so  it  was 
with  the  feudal  system  which  took  upon  itself 
rare  qualities  of  knightly  courtesy  in  chivalry. 
Here  the  idealistic  elements  of  human  nature 
found  most  gracious  expression.  And  chivalry 
at  its  highest  brought  into  the  heart  of  man 
an  ideal  of  gentle  and  courageous  and  courtly 
living  which  still  haunts  many  a  wistful  mo¬ 
ment  in  the  lives  of  men  busy  with  the  tasks 
of  an  age  which  prides  itself  upon  being 
sternly  practical.  But  the  virtues  of  chivalry, 
like  those  of  earlier  forms  of  social  life,  were 
limited  in  their  expression.  There  were  benev¬ 
olence  and  self-sacrifice  and  a  rising  in  swift 
response  to  the  sudden  hour  of  need.  But  the 
knight  had  areas  where  all  these  gracious 


TRIUMPHANT  BROTHERHOOD  137 


qualities  were  not  felt  to  apply.  Knightliness 
was  a  tribute  to  a  group.  It  was  not  a  tribute 
to  humanity.  Of  course  even  the  virtues  of 
the  age  of  chivalry  lent  themselves  to  counter¬ 
feit,  and  there  were  many  unlovely  products 
enough,  who  went  abroad  bearing  unworthily 
knightly  name.  All  the  while,  however,  we 
have  the  deathless  aspiration  of  the  human 
spirit  making  a  place  for  itself  as  best  it  can 
in  the  terms  of  the  organization  of  life  in 
which  it  finds  itself.  And  so  the  institution 
takes  on  a  quality  which  has  held  the  imagina¬ 
tion  of  men  in  many  an  age.  Even  when  the 
brilliant  Spanish  man  of  letters  laughed  at 
the  impractical  and  impossible  elements  in 
the  chivalric  ideal  there  was  a  sort  of  mellow 
sympathy  moving  through  his  laughter.  The 
astounding  thing  about  Don  Quixote  is  just 
the  fashion  in  which  many  people  have  found 
that  in  spite  of  all  his  absurdities  he  had  his 
own  secret  of  clutching  at  their  hearts. 

During  this  period  a  very  curious  and  sig¬ 
nificant  thing  was  happening.  The  ghost  of 
the  Roman  Empire  was  appearing  in  the 
world.  It  is  not  strange  that  men  found  them¬ 
selves  unable  to  forget  the  old  unity  and  the 
old  stability  of  the  Western  world.  And  dur¬ 
ing  the  very  period  when  feudalism  was  creat¬ 
ing  a  complex  of  bewildering  loyalties  all  over 


138  SYNTHETIC  CHRISTIANITY 


the  world  the  dream  of  a  more  comprehensive 
unity  was  haunting  the  mind  of  man.  The 
crowning  of  Charlemagne  by  the  Pope  on 
Christmas  day  of  the  year  800  is  a  pivotal 
date  in  its  relation  to  this  larger  aspiration. 
The  development  of  the  Holy  Roman  Empire 
in  Germany  in  the  tenth  century  represents 
another  stage.  The  new  empire  was  to  have 
two  heads.  The  Emperor  was  to  rule  its  body, 
the  Pope  was  to  rule  its  spirit.  For  all  the 
wars  which  it  inspired,  the  Holy  Roman 
Empire  was  never  able  to  become  a  real  world- 
order.  It  mastered  men’s  imagination.  But 
it  actually  proved  a  divisive  force.  The  petty 
sovereignties  of  Germany  and  the  lack  of  unity 
in  Italy  may  be  laid  to  the  fact  that  rulers 
anxious  to  master  the  world  proved  unable  to 
weld  into  solidarity  the  elements  of  their  own 
land.  Great  Popes  like  Gregory  YII  and 
Innocent  III  gave  a  certain  historic  majesty 
to  the  idea.  But,  after  all,  it  was  the  ghost 
of  the  Roman  Empire,  and  not  a  new  and  actu¬ 
ally  effective  political  organization,  which  had 
appeared  in  the  world.  The  idea  has  tremen¬ 
dous  significance.  It  kept  the  thought  of 
unity  before  the  mind  of  the  Middle  Ages.  In 
Dante’s  De  Monarcliia  we  see  how  inspiring  a 
conception  it  became  when  it  kindled  the  mind 
of  a  poetic  genius  with  profound  capacity  to 


TRIUMPHANT  BROTHERHOOD  139 


apprehend  political  principles.  It  was  at 
least  as  influential  as  the  ghost  in  Hamlet. 
But  it  did  not  become  the  inspiring  center  of 
a  new  world. 

As  a  matter  of  fact,  the  really  vital  experi¬ 
ments  in  political  organization  were  to  move 
through  the  great  national  phase  before  the 
international  idea  was  to  emerge  again  with 
commanding  power.  The  making  and  the 
functioning  of  the  mighty  nations  of  the 
modern  world  has  been  the  matter  of  supreme 
importance  in  the  life  of  the  last  thousand 
years.  Men  began  definitely  to  think  of  their 
life  together  in  the  terms  of  a  cluster  of  inde¬ 
pendent  states.  And  that  idea  gave  color  to 
the  most  characteristic  aspects  of  modern  life. 
France  came  to  new  national  consciousness  in 
the  latter  part  of  the  tenth  and  the  eleventh 
centuries  and  became  the  most  highly  articu¬ 
lated  sort  of  state  in  the  period  of  Louis  XIV 
in  the  seventeenth.  England  came  to  a  new 
national  consciousness  in  the  eleventh  century 
and  developed  a  tremendous  sense  of  the 
aggressive  energy  of  its  independent  life 
under  the  Tudors  in  the  sixteenth  century. 
Spain  came  to  a  new  quality  of  life  with  the 
expulsion  of  the  Moors  and  the  uniting  of 
separate  kingdoms  under  Ferdinand  and  Isa¬ 
bella  in  the  fifteenth  century  and  under 


140  SYNTHETIC  CHRISTIANITY 


Charles  Y  reached  an  apex  of  power.  Russia 
felt  new  pulses  of  life  under  the  leadership  of 
Peter  the  Great  in  the  latter  part  of  the  seven¬ 
teenth  century  and  came  to  an  increasing 
sense  of  its  own  life  under  such  rulers  as 
Catherine  II.  Italy  and  Germany  did  not 
achieve  unity  until  the  nineteenth  century, 
when  Cavour  in  the  one  state  and  Bismarck 
in  the  other  proved  the  statesmen  of  an 
achieved  national  solidarity.  The  United 
States  of  America  began  an  independent  life 
toward  the  end  of  the  eighteenth  century  and 
swept  westward  upon  the  North  American 
continent  in  a  mighty  movement  of  expansion 
during  the  nineteenth  century,  in  the  very 
period  when  a  great  struggle  for  the  main¬ 
taining  of  national  unity  was  fought  and 
won.  These  characteristic  states  illustrate 
the  movement  going  on  throughout  a  thousand 
years.  The  making  and  the  functioning  of  the 
nations  is  a  tale  of  vast  and  far-reaching  rela¬ 
tions.  The  conception  of  a  cluster  of  states 
and  of  a  balance  of  power  gives  us  the  very 
lines  which  defined  the  thought  of  men  as  the 
idea  of  nationality  came  to  its  own.  During 
this  period  the  life  of  man  came  to  many  a 
full  and  rich  expression.  But  there  were 
elements  in  the  situation  which  gave  deep 
concern  to  those  who  were  thinking  most 


TRIUMPHANT  BROTHERHOOD  141 


deeply  and  seriously  about  the  ultimate  power 
of  the  national  ideal  to  solve  the  problems  of 
men  as  they  went  on  with  the  experiment  of 
living  together  in  the  same  world. 

On  the  one  hand  there  was  the  tendency  of 
the  strong  nations  to  exploit  backward  people. 
From  the  latter  part  of  the  fifteenth  century 
new  continents  and  new  and  vast  territories 
came  within  the  ken  of  the  masterful  Western 
nations.  There  were  tremendous  days  of  dis¬ 
covery.  There  were  wonderful  achievements 
in  exploration.  There  was  a  mighty  expansion 
of  trade.  There  was  the  growth  of  the  idea 
of  colonization.  Powerful  nations  struggled 
for  mastery  in  these  tremendous  games  in  all 
parts  of  the  world.  The  long  contention 
between  England  and  France  in  the  eigh¬ 
teenth  century  illustrates  this  process  in 
action.  Out  of  the  whole  period  of  discovery 
and  exploration  and  colonization  and  the  crea¬ 
tion  of  new  states,  the  great  powers  emerged 
with  their  vast  colonial  possessions,  and  new 
national  groups  with  various  degrees  of 
autonomous  control  came  into  being.  The 
British  Empire,  after  disastrous  experience 
with  the  political  consequences  of  the  mercan¬ 
tile  theory,  came  to  a  method  of  life  which 
had  increasing  regard  for  the  interests  and 
the  liberties  of  all  parts  of  the  vast  domain. 


142  SYNTHETIC  CHRISTIANITY 


The  time  came  when  the  Dominion  of  Canada 
was  practically  an  independent  state  though 
a  part  of  the  empire,  and  this  example  was  fol¬ 
lowed  in  Australia  and  in  South  Africa.  A 
process  seemed  to  have  been  discovered  by 
which  a  vast  unity  expressing  itself  in  all 
parts  of  the  world  could  be  united  with  a 
growth  of  liberty  and  autonomy  on  the  parts 
of  the  constituent  groups.  Other  imperial 
nations  did  not  move  as  rapidly  as  Britain. 
In  fact,  the  idea  of  the  benevolent  despot  using 
absolute  authority  for  the  good  of  the  people, 
which  had  received  such  notable  expression 
in  the  eighteenth  century  through  Frederick 
the  Great  of  Prussia,  Catherine  II  of  Russia, 
and  Joseph  II  of  Austria,  continued  to  haunt 
the  mind  of  many  a  European  monarch  in  the 
nineteenth  century.  And  there  were  forces  not 
a  few  which  made  not  merely  for  benevolent 
autocracy  but  for  deliberate  exploitation.  The 
record  of  no  nation  was  spotless.  Great 
Britain  has  far  and  away  the  best  record  of 
the  nations  of  Western  Europe.  But  even  here 
there  has  been  a  ceaseless  battle  with  reaction¬ 
ary  forces,  and  there  is  many  a  page  which 
has  to  do  with  the  dealing  with  backward 
races  which  does  not  make  the  sort  of  reading 
which  delights  the  man  of  good  will.  Britain 
at  least  was  all  the  while  moving  toward  the 


TRIUMPHANT  BROTHERHOOD  143 


light  and  the  Pax  Britannica  became  a  nobler 
thing  than  the  Pax  Romana  had  ever  been. 
The  world  was  full  of  plague  spots,  however. 
Wherever  you  found  land  with  extraordinary 
resources  and  a  backward  people,  the  great 
states  of  the  world  were  likely  to  gather  like 
birds  of  prey.  Any  one  of  these  bits  of  pro¬ 
ductive  territory  held  in  weak  hands  was 
likely  to  become  a  center  of  disturbance  which 
might  involve  the  whole  world  in  war.  The 
great  powers  understood  this  and  more  and 
more  Europe  became  an  armed  camp. 

There  was  also  a  problem  of  another  kind. 
This  was  the  possibility  of  the  emerging  of 
the  superstate.  The  balance  of  power  was  a 
very  delicate  adjustment,  and  the  state  which 
was  strong  enough  to  break  it  was  all  too 
likely  to  think  very  little  of  the  subtle  adjust¬ 
ments  through  which  its  own  energies  crashed 
with  noisy  power.  And  there  was  also  the 
possibility  that  some  state  might  become 
strong  enough  to  dream  again  the  dream  of 
world  empire.  At  the  beginning  of  the  nine¬ 
teenth  century,  before  the  working  out  of  many 
of  the  delicate  adjustments  upon  which  the 
stability  of  the  period  just  behind  us  depended, 
just  this  had  happened  in  the  case  of  France 
under  the  leadership  of  Napoleon.  After 
Waterloo,  Europe  and  the  world  breathed 


144  SYNTHETIC  CHRISTIANITY 


freely.  It  was  not  expected  that  the  super¬ 
state  would  emerge  again.  But  the  unifica¬ 
tion  of  Germany  in  1870  brought  a  new  ele¬ 
ment  into  the  world  situation.  And  the  im¬ 
mense  and  perfectly  articulated  organization 
of  the  military  and  industrial  and  intellectual 
aspects  of  the  German  state  gave  thoughtful 
men  cause  for  much  searching  of  heart.  It 
was  easy  to  laugh  at  words  of  warning.  It 
was  easy  to  believe  that  the  rattling  of  the 
sword  in  the  scabbard  was  only  a  heightened 
form  of  harmless  national  rhetoric.  But  it 
was  also  possible  that  a  great  nation  had 
begun  to  dream  the  dream  of  the  superstate. 
And  that  meant  if  it  had  really  occurred,  that 
sooner  or  later  the  world  would  be  plunged 
into  war. 

But  in  the  meantime  something  of  another 
sort  had  been  occurring.  The  problem  of  the 
internal  organization  of  a  state  was  as  urgent 
as  that  of  its  external  relationships.  Men  had 
to  live  together  in  nations  as  well  as  in  the 
larger  life  of  the  world.  And  in  this  set  of 
relationships  political  democracy  had  its  rise. 
There  is  a  long  story  of  struggle  in  England, 
a  tale  which  flashes  with  particular  brightness 
when  we  come  to  the  Magna  Charta  and  the 
Bill  of  Rights,  a  tale  which  comes  to  dramatic 
moments  in  the  Reform  bills  of  1832  and  of 


TRIUMPHANT  BROTHERHOOD  145 


1867,  and  attains  other  stages  of  completeness 
with  the  abolition  of  many  of  the  charac¬ 
teristic  powers  of  the  House  of  Lords  and  the 
coming  of  women  within  the  range  of  the 
franchise.  There  is  a  sense  in  which  the  his¬ 
tory  of  the  House  of  Commons  is  the  history 
of  human  liberties.  But  much  of  the  story  is 
told  in  the  tale  of  other  lands.  The  United 
States  was  an  experiment  based  upon  the 
principles  of  English  lovers  of  liberty.  Here 
too  the  movement,  though  it  seemed  radical 
and  dramatic,  was  really  cautious  and  con¬ 
servative.  In  certain  colonies  only  church 
members  could  vote.  In  certain  States  after 
the  adoption  of  the  Constitution  only  property 
owners  could  vote.  It  was  only  after  a  great 
war  that  the  vote  came  within  the  range  of 
men  of  every  color.  And  only  recently  have 
women  been  included  in  its  responsibilities 
and  opportunities.  The  movement  in  England 
and  especially  the  experiment  in  America  had 
the  profoundest  influence  in  France.  And  so 
came  the  day  when  the  Old  Regime  was  swept 
away  and  the  French  people  rather  than  the 
French  crown  became  the  center  of  strategy. 
Even  Napoleon  called  himself  the  Emperor  of 
the  French  and  not  the  Emperor  of  France. 
Through  many  a  vicissitude  the  French  people 
passed,  but  they  now  seem  to  have  reached  a 


146  SYNTHETIC  CHRISTIANITY 


securely  republican  form  of  government. 
Take  it  all  in  all,  the  democratic  principle  has 
made  vast  headway  in  the  life  of  the  world. 
Political  democracy  has  become  more  and 
more  secure  in  one  great  nation  after  another 
in  spite  of  what  some  pessimists  would  call 
the  degradation  of  the  democratic  dogma.  It 
is  true  that  unless  Demos  has  education  and 
character,  his  rule  is  likely  to  be  undependable 
enough.  It  is  possible  for  him  to  be  a  victim 
even  as  he  sits  upon  his  throne.  But  at  least 
a  great  step  has  been  taken  when,  if  Demos 
is  a  victim,  he  is  the  victim  of  his  own  lack 
of  knowledge  and  character  and  not  of  the 
oppressive  tyranny  of  some  external  force.  It 
is  true  that  it  is  possible  for  a  republic  which 
is  characterized  by  the  free  functioning  of  the 
popular  will  in  its  internal  affairs  to  be  a 
leader  of  exploitation  as  regards  backward 
people  in  some  other  part  of  the  world.  It  is 
just  as  easy  for  a  group  of  people  to  be  sor¬ 
didly  selfish  as  it  is  for  an  individual  to  be 
a  remorseless  master  of  exploitation.  But 
here  again  if  power  is  centered  in  the  people, 
there  is  always  the  possibility  of  creating  a 
national  conscience. 

It  was  in  such  a  world  as  this  that  the 
attempt  of  Germany  to  become  a  superstate 
was  made.  The  attempt  was  all  involved  in 


TRIUMPHANT  BROTHERHOOD  147 


the  coils  of  many  a  bewildering  aspect  of  the 
politics  of  the  world.  And  so  it  came  to  pass 
that  the  beginning  of  the  Great  War  saw  an 
autocracy  like  Russia  united  with  a  free  com¬ 
monwealth  of  nations  like  the  British  com¬ 
monwealth  in  fighting  the  most  efficient  and 
highly  organized  autocracy  of  the  world.  A 
man  who  thought  closely  could  have  seen  early 
that  those  who  fought  the  Central  Powers 
were  not  unified  in  all  of  their  aims.  The 
menace  of  the  German  superstate  was  a  thing 
against  which  every  one  of  the  allied  states 
could  whole-heartedly  fight,  whatever  its  own 
constitution  and  whatever  its  own  ambitions. 
Even  a  state  which  was  tempted  to  cherish 
sinister  aims  of  its  own  could  honestly  enough 
fight  the  achievement  of  any  such  aims  by 
Germany.  So  that  there  was  no  question 
about  the  union  of  the  spirit  of  the  Allies  in 
the  endeavor  to  defeat  Germany.  But  the 
moment  the  question  was  lifted  as  to  what 
sort  of  order  was  to  be  established  after  the 
war  a  great  many  different  attitudes  emerged. 
France  was  actuated  more  by  fear  of 
Germany  than  by  love  of  democracy  and 
was  capable  of  being  tempted  by  ambitions  of 
its  own  hardly  within  the  range  of  the  legiti¬ 
mate  aspirations  of  the  democratic  state. 
Russia,  plunged  into  the  throes  of  an  internal 


148  SYNTHETIC  CHRISTIANITY 


revolution  at  last  dominated  by  a  group  of 
men  who  looked  to  Karl  Marx  for  inspiration, 
came  to  represent  an  autocracy  of  a  small 
group  of  the  proletariat  which  was  fighting 
for  its  life  and  was  ready  to  be  guilty  of  all 
the  savagery  and  lawlessness  of  an  autocracy 
without  a  history,  without  traditions,  and 
with  only  wild  and  imperfectly  analyzed 
hopes. 

This  situation  leads  us  to  another  aspect 
of  modern  human  experience  which  has 
greatly  increased  the  difficulty  of  the  problem 
men  have  to  work  out  in  learning  to  live  to¬ 
gether.  With  the  new  interest  in  the  natural 
world  which  came  with  the  Renaissance,  men 
began  to  study  the  forces  which  move  in  the 
material  world  and  to  take  practical  steps  for 
their  utilization  and  their  mastery.  The  prac¬ 
tical  utilization  of  gunpowder  changed  the 
character  of  war.  The  mariner’s  compass 
made  possible  the  great  age  of  discovery.  The 
invention  of  the  modern  process  of  printing 
made  the  era  of  the  complete  diffusion  of 
knowledge  possible.  The  telescope  immeasur¬ 
ably  enlarged  man’s  horizons  in  the  universe 
wffiere  he  dwells.  So  the  fifteenth  and  the 
sixteenth  centuries  saw  the  beginning  of  a  new 
world  of  knowledge  and  experience  for  man. 
It  was  toward  the  end  of  the  eighteenth  cen- 


TRIUMPHANT  BROTHERHOOD  149 


tury,  however,  that  in  1764  James  Hargreaves 
invented  the  famous  spinning  jenny.  In  1771 
Richard  Arkwright  invented  the  water  frame. 
In  1779  Samuel  Crompton  combined  the  best 
features  of  the  two  inventions  just  mentioned 
in  his  “mule.”  In  1784  Edmund  Cartwright 
patented  a  power  loom.  In  1793  Eli  Whitney 
invented  the  cotton  gin.  In  1785  James  Watt 
had  made  a  practical  steam  engine  which  was 
used  for  the  driving  of  machinery.  Fulton’s 
steamboat  was  successful  in  1807.  Stephen¬ 
son’s  locomotive  was  in  successful  operation 
by  1814.  These  are  only  a  few  of  the  multi¬ 
tude  of  inventions  which  produced  the  ma¬ 
chine  age.  Manufacture  and  transportation 
bent  to  their  purposes  the  mighty  energies  of 
the  natural  world.  The  machine  became  the 
slave  of  man.  It  seemed  clear  that  what 
human  slaves  did  for  Athens  machines  would 
do  for  the  modern  world.  A  vast  new  leisure 
was  opened  up  to  man  with  his  command  of 
all  the  mighty  energies  which  his  inventive 
genius  had  made  his  own.  But  as  it  turned 
out,  the  machine  era  was  a  period  of  a  new 
human  slavery.  Things  got  into  the  saddle 
and  began  to  ride  mankind.  Mrs.  Browning’s 
poignant  and  terrible  poem,  “The  Cry  of  the 
Children,”  voices  one  aspect  of  the  tragedy 
of  the  new  age.  A  new  type  of  city  built  about 


150  SYNTHETIC  CHRISTIANITY 


great  manufacturing  establishments  sprang 
up,  and  with  the  manufacturing  city  and  the 
terrible  slum  sections  poverty  took  on  a  new 
frightfulness.  There  was  the  reaping  of  tre¬ 
mendous  wealth  on  the  part  of  a  small  por¬ 
tion  of  the  population.  There  was  the  sordid 
exploitation  of  masses  of  men  and  women  and 
little  children.  Class  distinctions  based  upon 
industrial  and  economic  conditions  became 
tragically  sharp.  The  problem  of  poverty 
entered  upon  its  modern  phase.  It  was  in 
this  whole  situation  that  new  theories  of  the 
distribution  of  property,  of  ownership,  and  of 
control  began  to  be  formulated.  Karl  Marx 
worked  out  the  most  compact  and  brilliantly 
articulated  system  of  socialistic  principles. 
His  doctrine  of  class  war  and  the  final  victory 
of  the  proletariat  became  a  gospel  which  cap¬ 
tured  the  mind  and  quickened  the  imagination 
of  multitudes  of  people  the  world  over.  His 
materialistic  interpretation  of  history  and  his 
position  quite  without  the  sanctions  of  re¬ 
ligion  tended  to  produce  a  divorce  between  the 
prophets  of  the  religious  life  and  the  apostles 
of  the  new  social  synthesis.  But  the  same 
problems  were  felt  by  men  within  the  circle 
of  religion,  and  men  like  Kingsley  and 
Maurice  became  the  exponents  of  a  religion 
which  faced  its  social  obligations.  Russia, 


TRIUMPHANT  BROTHERHOOD  151 


staggering  under  the  weight  of  centuries  of 
autocracy,  at  last  fell  under  the  control  of  the 
most  radical  group  of  those  who  acknowledged 
the  authority  of  Marx,  and  so  there  came  into 
being  the  Bolshevist  regime.  A  Bolshevist 
Russia  became  worse  than  useless  for  the  pur¬ 
poses  of  the  Allies  toward  the  end  of  the  war 
and  complicated  the  situation  at  its  close. 
But  in  every  nation  there  were  groups  who 
were  thinking  in  the  terms  of  a  more  highly 
organized  function  of  capital  and  those  who 
were  thinking  in  the  terms  of  the  larger  func¬ 
tioning  of  every  man  who  worked  in  the  vari¬ 
ous  fields  of  industry.  The  two  groups  saw 
many,  perhaps  most  things  with  different  eyes 
and  they  greatly  complicated  the  situation  at 
the  Peace  Conference  at  the  close  of  the  war. 
So  with  nationalistic  ambitions  and  class 
rivalries  and  an  undisciplined  but  relentless 
autocracy  of  radical  thinkers  in  one  great 
nation  the  situation  was  complicated  enough 
wrhen  men  reached  the  place  of  practical  dis¬ 
cussion  at  the  close  of  the  World  War. 

By  this  time  the  figure  of  Woodrow  Wilson 
had  taken  on  the  largest  possible  international 
significance.  A  scholar  and  a  thinker  and  a 
convinced  idealist  of  immovable  purpose,  he 
had  seized  upon  the  critical  days  of  the  war  to 
gain  a  world-wide  attention  for  a  set  of  prim 


152  SYNTHETIC  CHRISTIANITY 


ciples  of  world- wide  democracy  and  good  will 
which  sounded  like  the  evangel  of  a  better  day 
as  they  echoed  and  reechoed  among  the  waste 
places  of  the  world  and  were  heard  in  the 
assemblies  where  all  the  subtleties  of  brilliant 
and  selfish  indirection  had  too  often  held  un¬ 
disputed  sway.  It  is  hard  to-day  to  reproduce 
in  our  minds  that  sense  of  contact  with  new 
and  creative  realities  which  came  to  us  in  the 
great  days  when  the  most  significant  utter¬ 
ances  of  President  Wilson  went  forth  like 
bugle  blasts  upon  the  world.  His  work  as  a 
prophet  was  superbly  done.  He  won  the  atten¬ 
tion  of  the  whole  world.  He  kindled  the  heart 
of  humanity  as  it  has  been  kindled  by  no 
leader  in  the  modern  period  of  history.  But 
it  was  necessary  that  prophecy  should  be  fol¬ 
lowed  by  practical  statesmanship,  by  skillful 
diplomacy,  and  by  effective  political  leader¬ 
ship.  And  here  something  went  wrong.  Per¬ 
haps  we  are  too  near  these  great  events  to  be 
sure  of  just  what  did  occur.  Perhaps  we  are 
as  yet  incapable  of  that  sure  and  wide  per¬ 
spective  which  can  wisely  estimate  and  truly 
judge.  It  is  clear  that  the  President  of  the 
United  States  found  himself  within  coil  upon 
coil  of  subtle  diplomatic  action  on  the  part 
of  those  who  did  not  share  his  own  vision  or 
his  high  desire.  It  seems  clear  that  sometimes 


TRIUMPHANT  BROTHERHOOD  153 


he  made  questionable  if  not  dangerous  con¬ 
cessions.  The  soul  of  Britain  was  with  him, 
but  the  most  brilliant  representative  of 
Britain  at  the  peace  table  was  a  seasoned  poli¬ 
tician,  who  with  all  his  desire  for  a  better 
world  saw  elements  and  possibilities  in  the 
situation  which  were  not  within  the  area  of 
President  Wilson’s  thought.  There  were 
times  when  he  must  have  felt  that  he  was  play¬ 
ing  a  lone  hand.  And  when  at  last  he  returned 
with  the  best  he  could  achieve  at  the  peace 
table,  he  was  repudiated  by  his  own  country 
and  left  a  broken  man  beside  the  wreck  of  the 
great  organization  from  which  he  had  hoped 
so  much  for  the  world.  It  seems  very  clear 
that  party  loyalties  played  a  larger  part  than 
international  insight  in  the  breaking  of  Wood- 
row  Wilson  and  the  wrecking  of  his  plans. 
But  at  all  events  the  golden  moment  of  world¬ 
wide  idealism  passed  and  a  heavy  cynicism 
settled  down  upon  the  life  of  the  world. 
Europe  staggered  toward  bankruptcy.  France 
prepared  to  extract  the  last  mark  from  Ger¬ 
many.  The  plague  spots  of  Europe  began  to 
burn  once  more  with  fever,  and  the  days  of 
disintegration  and  disillusionment  in  which 
we  are  living  came  on  apace.  The  conference 
on  tbe  limitation  of  armaments  was  a  fine  and 
noble  gesture,  but  in  a  good  many  relations 


154  SYNTHETIC  CHRISTIANITY 


it  has  not  proved  more  than  a  gesture.  Britain 
is  working  its  way  back  to  stability,  and  hav¬ 
ing  risked  almost  everything  upon  a  coopera¬ 
tion  which  the  United  States  has  not  supplied, 
is  finding  its  difficult  way  not  without  danger¬ 
ous  antagonists  of  the  reign  of  good  will 
within  its  borders  as  well  as  confusing  and 
baffling  forces  without  its  boundaries  with 
whom  it  must  live  in  some  sort  of  understand¬ 
ing  and  cooperation.  In  the  United  States 
there  is  a  slowly  but  surely  rising  tide  of  im¬ 
patience  with  a  sordid  national  selfishness  and 
a  gradually  maturing  conviction  that  we  must 
put  our  shoulders  under  the  load  and  lift  our 
share  of  the  burden  of  the  world. 

In  the  meantime  another  great  industrial 
transformation  is  sweeping  over  the  world. 
We  did  live  in  an  age  of  machines  directed  by 
skill.  Now  we  live  in  the  age  of  the  auto¬ 
matic  machines.  Mr.  Arthur  Pound,  in  that 
very  significant  book,  The  Iron  Man  in  Indus¬ 
try,  has  clearly  analyzed  the  features  which 
go  to  make  up  the  age  of  automatic  machines. 
The  automatic  machine  is  essentially  a  substi¬ 
tute  for  brains.  As  far  as  the  typical  worker 
is  concerned  it  requires  so  little  that  a  sub¬ 
normal  mind,  provided  it  is  united  to  a  spirit 
of  faithfulness  and  an  even  disposition,  makes 
the  best  sort  of  worker  in  this  sort  of  activity. 


TRIUMPHANT  BKOTHERHOOD  155 


The  work  of  an  attendant  upon  an  automatic 
machine  is  learned  with  infinitely  more  ease 
than  that  where  skill  is  necessary  in  directing 
the  machinery,  and  so  it  is  easy  to  pass  from 
industry  to  industry  and  from  place  to  place. 
Meantime  the  resilient  mind  of  man  requires 
occupation,  and  a  new  restlessness  and  a  new 
surrender  to  hot  and  lawless  vices  is  spread¬ 
ing  over  the  world.  Men  with  underdeveloped 
minds  are  given  standing  room  by  the  new 
system.  They  are  enabled  to  marry  and  be¬ 
come  the  fathers  of  children,  and  so  inferior 
types  can  now  develop  at  a  more  rapid  rate 
than  ever  before  in  the  history  of  man’s  strug¬ 
gle  upon  the  earth. 

Coincident  with  all  these  processes  the 
whole  body  of  Western  scientific  knowledge 
is  becoming  the  possession  of  races  other  than 
the  white  race.  The  dominance  of  the  white 
race  is  essentially  the  product  of  the  powers 
put  in  the  white  man’s  hand  by  modern  sci¬ 
ence.  And  all  this  power  is  now  within  the 
reach  of  other  races.  The  Russian- Japanese 
war  when,  for  the  first  time,  a  nation  belong¬ 
ing  to  the  white  race  and  handling  all  the 
implements  of  modern  scientific  warfare,  was 
defeated  by  a  nation  belonging  to  the  yellow 
race,  sent  a  thrill  of  new  race  consciousness 
all  through  the  world  of  color.  Mr.  Lathrop 


156  SYNTHETIC  CHRISTIANITY 


Stoddard  may  overdramatize  the  matter  in 
his  Rising  Tide  of  Color ,  but  there  is  scarcely 
a  question  as  to  the  necessity  of  our  facing  a 
whole  series  of  problems  arising  from  the  fact 
that  the  other  races,  armed  with  all  the  powers 
conferred  by  Western  knowledge,  will  play  a 
new  role  in  the  future  of  the  world.  A 
devastating  race  war  might  well  mean  the  end 
of  civilization.  And  yet  it  is  at  least  within 
the  ken  of  thought  which  is  cool  and  analytical 
and  not  at  all  driven  by  hectic  excitement. 

Even  apart  from  the  set  of  contingencies 
involved  in  this  situation  the  new  warfare  has 
become  so  fiercely  and  scientifically  destruc¬ 
tive  that  one  can  scarcely  visualize  the  devas¬ 
tation  which  another  world  war  even  between 
Western  nations  would  release  upon  the 
world.  It  would  be  a  war  where  non-com¬ 
batants  might  well  suffer  most  of  all,  and 
great  cities  might  easily  be  destroyed  in  a  few 
hours.  With  unequaled  control  over  the  forces 
of  nature,  modern  man  is  in  danger  of  becom¬ 
ing  the  victim  of  the  very  energies  which  he 
has  enslaved. 

More  than  this,  the  rapid  process  by  which 
the  Far  East  is  being  industrialized  will  bring 
about  a  dislocation  of  all  the  subtle  economic 
balances  which  stabilize  the  industrial  life  of 
the  world.  When  China  and  India  and  Japan 


TRIUMPHANT  BROTHERHOOD  157 


become  vast  centers  of  manufacturing  and  the 
machine  age  fully  arrives  in  the  Far  East,  all 
our  present  methods  of  world  organization 
will  become  inadequate. 

With  a  world  which  has  passed  through 
such  a  history  and  a  world  which  faces  a  series 
of  problems  of  which  we  have  given  only  a 
hint,  the  modern  men  and  women  confront 
their  own  task  in  relation  to  the  great  prob¬ 
lem  of  learning  to  live  together  wisely  and 
nobly  and  productively. 

It  is  a  wide  area  over  which  we  have  passed 
in  all  too  swift  and  cursory  a  fashion.  But 
at  least  we  have  seen  some  of  the  outstanding 
aspects  of  the  experiments  men  have  made 
as  they  have  dealt  with  the  problem  of  a  com¬ 
mon  occupation  of  the  same  country  and  the 
same  world,  and  we  have  seen  some  of  the 
elements  wrhich  go  to  make  up  our  present 
situation.  Now  we  must  definitely  lift  the 
question  as  to  the  relation  of  Christianity  to 
all  of  these  things.  Historically,  we  may  say 
that  in  every  sort  of  human  articulation  which 
it  has  touched  Christianity  has  proved  a  mel¬ 
lowing  and  ennobling  influence.  It  brought 
new  and  gracious  qualities  into  the  relations 
of  men  all  over  the  Roman  Empire  in  the  last 
days  of  its  life.  It  put  a  heart  of  kindness  and 
a  mind  of  justice  to  work  in  the  midst  of 


158  SYNTHETIC  CHRISTIANITY 


feudalism.  It  was  a  haunting  conscience  of 
nobility  in  every  one  of  the  rising  nations  of 
the  world.  It  was  all  the  while  developing  a 
consciousness  of  new  corollaries  of  that  spirit 
of  good  will  which  dwelt  in  its  heart.  It  made 
gladiatorial  combats  impossible.  It  dealt  the 
death  blow  of  slavery  by  creating  a  world¬ 
wide  conscience  which  would  not  rest  while 
slavery  remained  a  recognized  institution  in 
civilized  countries.  It  has  been  a  force  for 
amelioration  constantly  at  work  in  the  world. 
It  must  also  be  confessed,  when  we  include 
the  whole  history  of  the  church,  as  well 
as  the  functioning  of  the  spirit  of  Christ 
through  the  church,  within  the  range  of  our 
survey,  that  the  ecclesiastical  system  has 
wrought  its  own  havoc  in  the  world  and  has 
been  the  fountain  of  a  great  stream  of  cruelty 
which  has  watered  the  earth  with  human 
tears.  But  the  church  has  parted  company 
with  Jesus  Christ  whenever  this  has  occurred. 
We  must  also  say  that  in  its  moments  of  full¬ 
est  consciousness  of  the  meaning  of  its  own 
genius  Christianity  has  possessed  just  the 
synthetic  quality  in  this  realm  which  was  so 
evident  when  we  discussed  truth  and  goodness 
and  beauty.  It  has  included  in  its  own  in¬ 
sights  that  necessity  for  corporate  life  which 
is  fundamental  to  all  ample  living.  It  has 


TRIUMPHANT  BROTHERHOOD  159 


made  organization  a  spiritual  and  not  a 
mechanical  thing,  and  so  it  has  preserved  all 
its  strength  at  the  very  moment  when  it  has 
been  delivered  from  its  weaknesses.  It  has 
appropriated  every  good  feature  in  the  grow¬ 
ing  national  loyalties  and  has  moved  on  from 
them  to  the  full  conception  of  humanity  as  a 
great  family  which  is  one  of  the  greatest  con¬ 
tributions  of  Christianity  to  the  world.  As 
we  study  the  history  of  the  missionary  enter¬ 
prise,  we  are  all  the  while  seeing  a  Christian 
conscience  at  work  which  finds  in  every  man 
everywhere  a  potential  son  of  God  and  cannot 
rest  content  until  the  heir  enters  into  his  in¬ 
heritance.  The  tremendous  international 
vision  which  came  to  multitudes  of  people  in 
years  not  long  gone  was  just  the  world  view 
of  the  missionary  statesman  seen  in  its 
political  significance.  Christianity  made  men 
citizens  of  the  world  before  statesmen  had 
seen  the  meaning  of  world  citizenship.  With 
the  coming  of  the  industrial  age  the  con¬ 
science  of  the  Christian  religion  began  to  deal 
with  the  new  situation.  And  as  the  years 
passed  by,  that  conscience  became  more  power¬ 
ful  and  more  searching  until  it  is  now  prob¬ 
ably  the  most  characteristic  aspect  of  Chris¬ 
tianity  in  action.  The  prophet  of  social  and 
industrial  application  of  the  principles  of 


160  SYNTHETIC  CHRISTIANITY 


J esus  is  heard  in  every  part  of  the  church  and 
his  voice  is  lifted  in  every  denomination.  It 
is  only  expressing  the  truth  if  we  say  that 
Christianity  has  been  the  greatest  socializing 
influence  in  the  history  of  the  modern  world. 

But  Christianity  is  preeminently  a  religion 
of  haunting  ideals.  Its  most  fundamental 
characteristic  lies  precisely  in  the  fact  that 
it  is  never  exhausted  by  its  achievements.  It 
always  comes  back  to  the  battlefield  with  the 
light  of  new  visions  in  its  eyes  and  the  fire 
of  new  purposes  in  its  heart  and  the  inspira¬ 
tion  of  new  activities  driving  its  hand.  And 
there  is  no  question  at  all  that  one  of  the 
most  fertile  fields  in  which  its  capacity 
for  transforming  influence  is  to  be  felt  may 
be  found  in  the  ample  socialization  of  the  life 
of  the  world.  We  may  well  bring  this  lecture  to 
a  close  by  some  investigation  of  the  fashion  in 
which  this  synthetic  religion  will  apply  its 
principles  to  the  relations  of  the  individual, 
to  society,  and  to  the  creation  of  a  Christian 
social  organism  as  its  inherent  character  is 
given  an  opportunity  to  express  itself  in  these 
things. 

When  we  approach  this  matter  our  first  in¬ 
sight  may  well  be  the  apprehension  that 
Christianity  is  essentially  a  society.  An  indi¬ 
vidual  Christian  is  only  a  fragment.  He  can 


TRIUMPHANT  BROTHERHOOD  161 


never  be  Christianity.  It  is  only  a  Christian 
society  which  can  express  the  genius  of  the 
Christian  faith.  And  as  long  as  society  is  un- 
Christian  or  only  partly  Christian,  you  have 
only  a  partial  view  of  the  meaning  of  Chris¬ 
tianity  itself.  Its  goal  is  corporate.  Its  con¬ 
summation  is  a  society  of  brothers.  Its 
achievement  is  to  be  the  creation  of  a  world¬ 
wide  society  of  good  will.  And  anything  less 
than  this  is  only  a  fragment  of  that  reality 
which  glows  at  the  heart  of  the  Christian 
faith.  In  the  old  empires  based  on  force,  in 
the  society  based  on  slavery,  in  the  social 
sanctions  founded  on  individual  loyalty,  in 
the  rising  tide  of  national  enthusiasm  you  see 
attempts  to  realize  often  by  tragically  evil 
means,  sometimes  by  means  partly  good  and 
partly  evil,  sometimes  by  means  good  but  in¬ 
adequate,  that  social  synthesis  which  is  the 
inevitable  end  toward  which  life  moves  unless 
progress  is  an  illusion  and  goodness  is  to  be 
defeated  in  the  life  of  man.  And  it  is  tremen¬ 
dously  significant  that  this  social  instinct,  this 
consciousness  of  the  necessity  for  organiza¬ 
tion  which  has  expressed  itself  in  such  mani¬ 
fold  forms,  is  found  to  be  structural  in  the 
Christian  faith.  The  New-Testament  empha¬ 
sis  on  the  kingdom  of  God  is  the  flowering  into 
speech  of  this  consciousness  of  solidarity  as 


162  SYNTHETIC  CHRISTIANITY 


the  goal  of  the  Christian  religion  as  well  as 
the  goal  of  human  life. 

The  second  insight  which  will  come  as  a 
result  of  our  investigation  may  well  be  an 
understanding  that  Christianity  can  never 
come  to  its  full  expression  without  a  profound 
influence  upon  the  sanctions  of  government 
and  the  activities  of  political  life.  This  does 
not  mean  a  loss  of  religious  liberty.  A  tyran¬ 
nical  church  mastering  an  enslaved  state  is 
no  more  a  Christian  ideal  than  a  tyrannical 
state  mastering  an  enslaved  church.  But  we 
are  to  be  very  careful  not  to  interpret  a  free 
church  in  a  free  state  to  mean  a  church  whose 
moral  insights  never  become  the  possession  of 
the  state,  a  form  of  religion  which  never  offers 
a  social  conscience  to  the  society  of  which  it 
is  a  part.  The  real  goal  of  this  development 
is  a  morally  commanding  church  in  a  freely 
influenced  state.  The  church  is  to  ask  for  no 
tyrannical  power.  It  is  to  ask  for  no  artifi¬ 
cial  protection.  But  the  moral  power  of  its 
own  conscience  and  the  might  of  the  social 
passion  which  it  creates  are  so  to  permeate 
society  that  in  the  very  moment  when  the 
church  asks  for  no  institutional  recognition  it 
becomes  a  greater  power  than  in  any  previous 
period  of  its  life.  The  government  which  does 
not  recognize  the  validity  of  the  Christian 


TRIUMPHANT  BROTHERHOOD  163 


social  ideal  will  go  to  the  rocks  at  last.  The 
principles  upon  which  Jesus  based  all  social 
relations  are  to  he  made  dominant  in  the  state. 
A  man  cannot  be  a  Christian  in  his  private 
life  and  recognize  no  relation  between  his 
political  activities  and  the  movements  of  his 
government  and  the  law  of  Christ.  Christian¬ 
ity  is  to  give  a  new  soul  to  government,  a  new 
conscience  to  all  political  activities.  A  democ¬ 
racy  offers  the  only  real  sort  of  opportunity 
for  this  consummation.  But  democracy  is 
only  an  empty  form  until  the  character  of  the 
citizens  equals  their  political  power  and  their 
social  vision  keeps  pace  with  their  freedom. 
It  is  here  that  Christianity  is  to  make  its 
greatest  contribution  to  political  life. 

Then  Christianity  is  simply  unable  to  ignore 
all  the  complex  and  confused  elements  of  our 
industrial  and  economic  situation.  And  here 
it  confronts  several  specific  tasks.  It  must 
save  the  man  whose  sudden  opportunity  in 
this  new  age  tempts  him  to  become  an  ex¬ 
ploiter  rather  than  a  servant  of  humanity.  It 
must  do  this  for  his  own  sake.  The  poverty 
of  mind  and  conscience  and  spirit  which 
comes  to  a  successful  practitioner  of  exploita¬ 
tion  is  one  of  the  most  tragic  things  in  the 
world.  It  will  do  this  for  the  sake  of  all 
those  who  are  within  reach  of  his  power. 


164  SYNTHETIC  CHRISTIANITY 


Human  values  must  perpetually  be  kept  in 
emphasis  as  more  fundamental  than  property 
values.  Of  course  this  is  sound  economics  as 
well  as  sound  religion,  for  a  depleted  human 
society  will  ultimately  mean  a  lowering  of 
every  other  sort  of  value  in  the  world.  The 
insight  that  life  is  organic  must  be  brought  to 
bear  upon  all  class  wars.  The  folly  of  class 
war  lies  just  in  the  fact  that,  carried  to  its 
bitter  end,  it  becomes  the  suicide  of  humanity. 
And  so  Christianity  has  the  support  of  the 
deepest  of  human  instincts — the  instinct  of 
the  self-preservation  of  society — as  it  puts  the 
whole  weight  of  its  life  into  the  struggle  for 
a  brotherly  world.  This  means  responsibility 
as  well  as  privilege  for  all  men  everywhere. 
The  Christian  social  passion  does  not  cry  out 
for  a  world  where  some  particular  group  of 
workers  shall  have  rewards  without  service. 
It  is  opposed  to  exploitation  by  the  proletariat 
even  as  it  is  opposed  to  exploitation  by  any 
other  group.  As  it  confronts  the  age  of  the 
automatic  machine,  it  comes  with  an  insistent 
emphasis  upon  the  fertilizing  and  productive 
use  of  leisure  in  those  activities  which  up¬ 
build  the  mind,  enrich  the  conscience,  develop 
the  body,  and  enlarge  the  spiritual  life.  Every 
hour  gained  from  the  factory  through  the  slav¬ 
ery  of  the  machines  to  the  human  will  is  an 


TRIUMPHANT  BROTHERHOOD  165 


hour  won  for  the  opportunity  for  the  develop¬ 
ment  of  a  fuller  and  better  life.  Men’s  work, 
their  environment  and  their  play  must  feel  the 
commanding  inspiration  of  the  great  Chris¬ 
tian  ideals.  Industry  must  be  made  Christian 
if  men  are  to  live  together  as  brothers. 

And  inevitably  the  Christian  social  ideal 
must  become  operative  in  international  rela¬ 
tions.  This  is  the  greatest  task  before  the 
social  mind  of  man.  The  League  of  Nations 
may  be  no  more  than  a  step.  But  it  is  a  step 
in  the  inevitable  direction.  The  world  can 
only  survive  by  means  of  the  development  of 
some  genuine  sort  of  world  order.  No  real 
value  in  national  life  is  to  be  lost.  Indeed, 
the  nation  in  its  essential  meaning  can  be 
saved  only  through  the  solving  of  the  inter¬ 
national  problem.  A  world  with  one  science 
and  one  vast  and  infinitely  articulated  indus¬ 
try  and  one  marvelous  complex  system  of 
transportation  is  inevitable  if  civilization  is 
to  survive  and  such  a  world  is  possible  only 
on  the  basis  of  recognized  international  rela¬ 
tionships.  All  of  this  is  necessary  from  the 
political  and  economic  standpoint.  It  is 
Christianity  which  gives  a  soul  to  the  whole 
movement  and  sees  in  all  its  aspects  an 
approach  to  that  form  where  the  sense  of 
humanity  as  a  family  shall  become  universal 


166  SYNTHETIC  CHRISTIANITY 


and  men  shall  find  in  brotherhood  practical 
efficiency  as  well  as  moral  and  spiritual 
power. 

It  is  just  this  thing  which  strikes  us  as 
having  a  real  element  of  the  marvelous  in  it. 
We  come  to  a  new  world  evolving  from  the 
application  of  an  entirely  new  set  of  forces. 
And  in  this  world  we  find  a  whole  complex  of 
social  necessities  in  respect  of  which  Chris¬ 
tianity  has  the  inspiring  and  interpreting 
word  to  say.  If  there  is  such  a  thing  as  social 
progress,  Christianity  will  preside  at  its  con¬ 
summation. 

But  the  strategy  of  the  Christian  position 
has  profounder  aspects.  We  must  face  two 
great  problems  in  the  creating  of  the  new 
society.  The  first  is  the  creation  of  the  indi¬ 
vidual  capable  of  functioning  in  the  new 
social  world.  The  second  is  to  preserve  the 
integrity  of  personality  in  a  world  which  real¬ 
izes  its  social  destiny.  Now,  the  moment  we 
realize  the  actual  elements  in  these  problems 
we  begin  also  to  see  the  fashion  in  which 
Christianity  meets  them.  There  is  no  other 
force  the  world  knows  equal  to  the  spirit  of 
Jesus  in  producing  the  social  mind  in  the  indi¬ 
vidual,  and  there  is  no  other  power  with  such 
resources  for  transforming  the  individual  life 
so  that  without  weakness  or  inner  disintegra- 


TRIUMPHANT  BROTHERHOOD  167 


tion,  it  will  be  able  to  take  its  place  in  a  world 
made  truly  social.  It  is  here  that  what,  in 
our  loose  way  of  speaking,  we  denominate  the 
individual  and  the  social  gospel  meet  and 
are  harmonized  in  a  higher  unity.  The  indi¬ 
vidual  gospel  is  to  reconstruct  the  individual 
to  make  him  capable  of  social  functioning. 
The  social  gospel  is  to  give  him  his  task  and 
his  world,  the  great  organism  of  which  he  is 
to  become  a  part.  But  all  the  while  we  are 
wondering  if  society  is  not  so  great  that  it  will 
quite  overwhelm  the  individual.  Can  that 
precious  and  unique  thing  personality  be 
kept  at  its  richest  and  fullest  in  a  world  which 
is  at  last  a  great  social  organism?  The  reply 
is  that  the  very  nature  of  Christianity  is  the 
creation  of  a  society  where  each  individual  is 
of  infinite  value,  each  personality  has  eternal 
significance,  and  yet  together  and  not  alone 
they  reach  the  goal  of  all  experience  and  of  all 
endeavor.  Indeed,  it  is  only  in  the  society  of 
friendly  men  that  individual  personality  can 
reach  and  maintain  its  full  stature.  That 
great  building  rooted  and  grounded  in  love 
which  inspired  the  mind  of  Paul  is  indeed  our 
individual  and  our  social  goal.  And  Chris¬ 
tianity  proves  the  synthesis  of  our  social  hopes 
as  well  as  the  power  harmonizing  all  the  ele¬ 
ments  of  beauty  and  goodness  and  truth. 


LECTURE  V 


TRIUMPHANT  GODLINESS 

Dr.  T.  R.  Glover,  the  wealth  of  whose 
erudition  and  the  sudden  flash  of  whose  in¬ 
sight  have  a  way  of  filling  us  with  glad 
surprise,  gives  one  lecture  in  Progress  in  Re¬ 
ligion  to  the  Christian  Era  to  “Early  Man 
and  His  Environment.”  It  is  a  fascinating 
attempt  to  trail  the  mind  of  man  back  to  its 
primitive  reactions  in  the  presence  of  its  own 
experiences  and  the  curious  baffling  world.  A 
good  deal  of  work  has  been  done  in  this  field, 
and  if  most  of  what  we  read  seems  to  belong 
to  the  category  of  brilliant  guesses,  there  are 
some  things  of  which  we  may  be  fairly  sure. 
From  the  very  beginning  of  his  life  as  a  being 
who  could  think  and  know,  man  has  con¬ 
fronted  the  infinite  mystery  with  an  over¬ 
mastering  desire  to  find  an  ally.  Many  of  his 
experiments  in  this  direction  were  crude  and 
rude  enough.  But  from  the  first  he  was  all 
the  while  trying  to  get  the  powerful  mystery 
or  the  powerful  mysteries  which  he  felt  in  the 
world  to  be  on  his  side  and  not  against  him. 
There  came  lonely  hours  of  spiritual  wistful- 

J68 


TRIUMPHANT  GODLINESS  169 


ness  when  he  wanted  not  only  an  ally  but  a 
friend.  These  were  great  hours  and  perhaps 
represented  a  high  consummation  in  the  evo¬ 
lution  of  religion.  But  at  every  stage  man 
knew  that  if  his  world  were  against  him,  every¬ 
thing  would  go  wrong.  And  so  his  attempt 
to  find  allies  in  the  powers  that  moved  so  in¬ 
scrutably  was  his  first  and  fundamental  and, 
in  a  sense,  his  perpetual  endeavor. 

We  can  discern  two  attitudes  as  man  went 
on  with  his  adventure  of  discovering  and 
utilizing  the  Deity.  One  was  the  tendency  to 
regard  the  divine  as  a  series  of  mysterious 
powers.  The  other  was  the  tendency  to  regard 
the  divine  as  a  series  of  conscious  individuals. 
We  may  at  first  be  inclined  to  regard  the 
second  as  inevitably  an  advance  upon  the  first. 
That  which  was  an  echo  of  human  personality 
seems  without  a  peradventure  of  a  doubt  higher 
than  that  which  was  an  echo  of  the  processes 
of  nature  or  of  the  vitality  in  action  seen  in 
animal  life.  It  is  at  least  significant,  however, 
that  the  later  stages  of  man’s  experience  in 
respect  of  these  matters  has  had  a  way  at 
times  of  turning  his  mind  to  a  more  noble 
sense  of  potencies  and  forces  rather  than  to 
the  type  of  life  which  we  see  reflected  in  the 
experience  of  man  himself.  Matthew  Arnold’s 
“power  not  ourselves”  may  seem  infinitely  re- 


170  SYNTHETIC  CHRISTIANITY 


moved  from  the  mysterious  power  which 
commanded  the  allegiance  of  primitive  man. 
But  with  all  the  infinite  refinement  of  Mat¬ 
thew  Arnold’s  conception,  it  finds  its  roots  in 
a  religion  which  was  inspired  by  things  and 
forces  rather  than  in  a  religion  which  was 
inspired  by  the  inner  life  of  man  himself.  At 
all  events,  the  practice  of  religion  as  the  com¬ 
ing  to  mastery  over  mysterious  powers  and 
the  practice  of  religion  as  the  gaining  of  the 
favor  of  conscious  individuals  who  could  aid 
the  worshiper  in  all  sorts  of  ways  in  a  measure 
stood  over  against  each  other.  The  one  had 
its  own  kinships  with  all  the  later  develop¬ 
ments  of  magic.  The  other  had  its  inevitable 
relations  to  all  the  developments  of  personal 
religion.  When  the  one  became  scientific  it 
could  believe  in  the  reign  of  law.  When  the 
other  became  ethical,  it  could  believe  in  a  God 
with  a  character.  But  here  we  are  running 
ahead  of  our  story.  What  we  want  to  see  now 
is  just  the  fashion  in  which  a  personal  and 
an  impersonal  approach  to  religion  can  be 
found  in  very  early  stages  of  the  life  of  man. 

When  we  think  of  the  Christian  religion  in 
relation  to  the  sort  of  insight  which  developed 
in  respect  of  these  two  fundamental  religious 
attitudes,  we  are  tremendously  interested  to 
find  that  the  essential  elements  in  the  two  are 


TRIUMPHANT  GODLINESS  171 


both  found  in  the  Christian  faith.  In  the 
study  of  Jesus  himself  you  always  find  a  sense 
of  conscious  individual  life  in  clear  emphasis 
on  the  one  hand  and  on  the  other  a  sense  of 
a  world  of  vast  and  mysterious  forces  over 
against  which  he  stands.  Only  he  approaches 
this  world  never  as  a  foe  but  always  as  a 
master.  We  are  far  from  having  thought 
through  to  any  complete  understanding  the 
relation  of  the  power  we  find  in  things  and 
the  power  we  find  in  personality.  And  it  is 
easy  to  raise  no  end  of  confusing  questions  in 
respect  of  Jesus’  attitude  of  mastery  toward 
the  world  without  him.  It  is  at  least  tremen¬ 
dously  significant  that  the  attitude  of  Jesus 
toward  the  earliest  dualism  of  human  thought, 
the  problem  of  the  power  wThich  came  to  light 
in  human  consciousness  and  the  power  which 
came  to  light  in  all  the  processes  of  the 
natural  world,  was  that  of  a  master  in  both 
realms.  He  is  Lord  in  both  worlds.  And 
as  we  shall  see  this  finding  of  a  higher  unity 
has  been  a  persistent  attitude  of  the  Chris¬ 
tian  religion  as  the  mind  of  man  has  developed 
and  the  problem  has  assumed  aspects  in¬ 
finitely  complicated  and  baffling.  It  is  won¬ 
derfully  significant  to  observe  that  any  man 
at  any  stage  of  the  unfolding  religious  life  of 
early  man  could  he  have  come  into  contact 


172  SYNTHETIC  CHRISTIANITY 


with  the  Jesus  whom  the  Gospels  portray 
would  have  felt  that  this  marvelous  Master 
included  in  his  own  experience  and  action  the 
thing  which  was  central  in  religion  to  him. 
To  be  sure,  Christianity  cast  off  many  aspects 
which  are  important  in  various  forms  of 
primitive  faith  and  practice.  Magic  has  no 
place.  That  sense  of  a  universe  which  may 
prove  fickle  either  through  the  incalculable 
action  of  forces  or  individuals  is  now  tran¬ 
scended.  But  the  root  ideas  of  powers  which 
must  be  on  a  man’s  side  and  of  conscious  life 
behind  this  world’s  manifold  activities  remain 
in  the  higher  unity  which  is  implicit  in  the 
whole  mind  and  method  of  Jesus.  He  could 
have  made  a  quick  and  authentic  contact  with 
any  human  being  at  any  stage  of  the  develop¬ 
ment  of  the  religious  life.  So  much  cannot 
be  said  to  be  sure  of  all  the  followers  of  Jesus. 
That  sure  instinct  for  the  thread  of  truth  to 
be  unraveled  from  the  mass  of  error  has  some¬ 
times  seemed  to  be  quite  foreign  to  the  atti¬ 
tude  of  the  Christian  missionary.  It  is  one  of 
the  happy  things  about  our  present  situation 
that  in  every  part  of  the  world  we  are  learn¬ 
ing  to  approach  men  through  that  element  in 
their  experience  and  worship  which  offers  a 
real  point  of  understanding  with  the  faith 
which  we  would  bring  to  them.  A  faith  which 


TRIUMPHANT  GODLINESS  173 


was  absolutely  original  would  be  absolutely 
incomprehensible.  And  so  the  contacts  which 
Christianity  could  have  made  with  primitive 
forms  of  worship  illustrate  the  contacts 
which  it  may  make  with  backward  peoples 
who  still  represent  in  some  measure  the  primi¬ 
tive  mind. 

At  a  later  stage  of  the  religious  develop¬ 
ment  of  men,  we  see  two  conceptions  set 
sharply  over  against  each  other.  On  the  one 
hand  there  is  the  idea  of  the  divine  as  a  great 
hierarchy  of  gods.  On  the  other  there  is  the 
conception  of  God  as  a  lonely  only  one.  On 
the  one  hand  there  is  such  a  society  of  deities 
as  that  represented  by  the  Greek  or  the  Roman 
Pantheon.  On  the  other  there  is  the  supreme 
and  only  Deity  found  at  the  center  of  the 
worship  of  the  greatest  Hebrew  prophets.  The 
society  of  gods  had  many  attractive  aspects. 
It  made  the  mysterious  region  above  the  ken 
of  mortal  mind  and  beyond  the  reach  of 
human  experience  a  wonderfully  vivid  and 
various  world  of  experiences  of  infinite 
romance  and  of  all  the  range  of  which  a  per¬ 
sonal  life  is  capable.  It  gave  the  opportunity 
for  every  human  desire  and  every  human  im¬ 
pulse  to  have  its  own  tutelary  deity.  If  the 
love  of  wisdom  could  look  to  Athena,  the  love 
of  wine  could  look  to  Dionysius.  But  this 


174  SYNTHETIC  CHRISTIANITY 


very  richness  of  life  was  also  a  thing  with 
tragic  elements  in  it.  For  if  every  good  thing 
in  humanity  had  a  divine  existence  beyond 
human  ken,  the  same  thing  was  true  of  all 
which  degraded  the  mind  of  man  and  defiled 
his  body.  The  gods  had  all  the  vices  of  which 
men  were  guilty.  The  worst  thing  which  could 
happen  to  men  was  just  to  become  like  some 
of  their  deities.  And  it  is  also  clear  that  the 
endless  contentions  of  mutually  antagonistic 
deities  with  the  perpetual  clash  of  perpetually 
differing  desires  offered  no  explanation  of 
such  amazing  unity  as  the  world  obviously 
possessed  and  no  basis  for  a  nobler  moral 
unity  yet  to  be  attained.  The  hierarchy  of 
deified  impulses  might  explain  the  moral  con¬ 
fusion  of  the  world.  It  could  surely  offer  no 
way  out  of  it. 

The  inevitable  tendency  of  the  clearest 
Greek  thinking  was  away  from  the  tragic  con¬ 
tention  of  immoralities  made  divine  to  a  belief 
in  a  world-order  with  a  real  unity  and  a  nobler 
reality  at  its  base.  The  worst  characteristics 
of  the  deities  began  to  be  ignored  or  forgotten 
or  denied  by  being  reduced  to  allegory. 
Loftier  and  loftier  attributes  were  ascribed  to 
the  most  powerful  gods,  and  something  very 
like  monotheism  finally  emerged  in  the  great¬ 
est  of  the  Greek  thinkers. 


TRIUMPHANT  GODLINESS  175 


But  in  the  meantime  another  nation  which 
was  to  be  the  religious  teacher  of  the  world 
had  achieved  a  sure  and  lofty  belief  in  one 
God,  the  Lord  and  Master  of  all  existence 
everywhere.  The  story  of  the  struggle  toward 
monotheism  in  Israel  and  of  its  final  and  com¬ 
plete  triumph  can  only  be  referred  to  in  pass¬ 
ing.  There  is  a  good  deal  which  is  dim  and 
uncertain  about  the  tale.  And  perhaps  we  are 
more  inclined  to  consider  its  stages  and 
aspects  important  than  the  actual  facts  would 
justify.  The  important  matter  is  just  that  a 
completely  self-conscious  monotheism  did 
emerge  in  Israel  and  that  it  received  immortal 
expression  in  the  hands  of  the  greatest  of  the 
prophets.  There  are  passages  in  the  Isaiah 
of  the  exile  which  carry  human  speech  near 
to  its  limits  in  the  sublime  expression  of  this 
mastering  thought,  which  was  a  living  experi¬ 
ence  in  the  mind  and  the  heart  of  the  writer. 
We  feel  that  we  are  on  the  mountain  tops  of 
the  world  as  we  listen  to  these  outbursts  of 
insight  into  the  nature  of  the  great  and  only 
Master  of  the  World. 

But  the  situation  is  not  quite  so  simple  as 
it  appears  at  first  sight.  We  now  know  that 
monotheism  itself  may  become  a  hard  and 
rigid  and  barren  thing.  We  know  that  we 
may  think  of  God  as  so  isolated  among  his 


176  SYNTHETIC  CHRISTIANITY 


lonely  perfections  that  he  seems  forever  for 
eign  to  all  the  pulsing  wonder  of  the  world 
and  all  the  glad  richness  of  its  social  life; 
Between  a  decadent  polytheism  and  a  lofty 
monotheism  we  would  not  hesitate  for  a  mo^ 
ment.  There  is  a  sense  in  which  Israel  has 
made  monotheists  of  us  all  at  least  so  far 
as  to  making  us  incapable  of  being  polytheists. 
But  even  as  we  admit  this  we  are  aware  that 
there  is  a  monotheism  which  proves  too  much. 
There  is  a  monotheism  which  seems  a  strange 
basis  for  elements  which  are  structural  to  all 
that  we  know  of  experience  at  its  very  high¬ 
est.  When  the  social  passion  is  fully  alive 
and  fully  self-conscious  there  is  a  question  as 
to  whether  it  can  ever  be  contented  with  a 
bleak  and  barren  monotheism.  And  so  the 
question  arises  and  at  last  becomes  pressing: 
Is  there  no  way  to  maintain  all  the  fresh  full¬ 
ness  of  life  which  is  characteristic  of  polythe¬ 
ism  and  at  the  same  time  all  the  lofty  unity 
of  the  divine  life  which  is  the  central  meaning 
.  of  the  faith  in  one  God?  It  may  seem  that 
here  we  confront  an  ultimate  choice.  We  can¬ 
not  have  the  good  of  one  system  and  also  the 
good  of  the  other.  We  have  reached  a  dualism 
which  cannot  be  bridged. 

However,  we  have  seen  so  often  that  Chris¬ 
tianity  represents  a  synthesis  in  which  oppos- 


TRIUMPHANT  GODLINESS  177 


ing  views  come  to  a  higher  unity  that  it  may 
be  worth  our  while  to  make  some  investigation 
of  the  characteristic  assertions  of  the  historic 
faith  in  order  that  we  may  see  if  they  throw 
any  light  upon  this  question.  When  we  come 
to  the  study  of  Gnosticism  in  the  second  cen¬ 
tury  we  see  at  once  that  it  was  an  attempt  on 
the  part  of  the  spirit  of  polytheism  to  make  a 
home  for  itself  in  the  Christian  faith.  But 
the  results  are  very  bizarre.  The  Gnostics  so 
easily  accept  all  sorts  of  superstitions.  And 
they  so  break  company  with  every  charac¬ 
teristic  of  the  faith  as  it  speaks  in  the  New 
Testament  that  the  pursuit  of  this  path  does 
not  seem  very  promising.  Indeed,  the  church 
itself  very  definitely  repudiated  Gnosticism 
and  there  is  not  any  indication  that  it  has 
looked  back  upon  the  decision  with  anything 
like  mournful  regret. 

We  are  driven,  then,  to  look  into  the  heart 
of  the  historic  faith  to  see  if  at  any  point  there 
is  a  position  which  suggests  the  synthesis 
which  would  offer  a  higher  unity  to  that  sense 
of  life’s  fullness  and  social  meaning  which  we 
find  in  polytheism  and  that  lofty  unity  which 
we  find  in  the  faith  in  one  God.  Now  we  find 
that  we  are  coming  right  up  to  the  historic 
thought  of  God  as  triune  which  has  haunted 
the  mind  of  the  church  through  all  of  its  his- 


178  SYNTHETIC  CHRISTIANITY 


tory.  And  immediately  a  belief  which  may 
have  seemed  a  bit  of  utterly  valueless  meta¬ 
physics  imported  into  the  simplicity  of  the 
Gospels  takes  on  new  meaning.  For  we  now 
see  clearly  enough  that  the  root  of  the  Chris¬ 
tian  idea  of  the  Trinity  is  precisely  the  har¬ 
monizing  of  the  idea  of  the  unity  and  the 
social  life  of  God. 

Whatever  difficulties  the  minds  of  men  may 
find  with  the  doctrine  itself,  one  cannot  deny 
the  amazing  fact  that  with  a  sure  instinct  for 
the  deepest  things  in  experience  the  church 
sought  for  a  view  of  God  which  would  account 
completely  and  happily  both  for  the  unity 
and  the  variety  of  the  world.  The  God  who  is 
worshiped  as  Father  and  Son  and  Holy  Spirit, 
one  great  Life  with  one  harmonious  will  and 
all  the  while  three  centers  of  consciousness 
and  love,  is  indeed  a  deity  regarding  whom  we 
may  ask  many  baffling  questions,  but  he  is  also 
a  deity  in  whose  own  nature  the  social  prin¬ 
ciple  has  perfect  expression  and  the  richness 
of  whose  life  is  the  natural  counterpart  even 
as  it  is  the  source  of  all  the  richness  and 
variety  of  the  life  of  the  world.  All  the  evil 
elements  of  polytheism  are  cast  utterly  away 
and  the  insights  which  gave  polytheism  a  cer¬ 
tain  vitality  are  kept  perpetually  alive  in  the 
Christian  thought  of  the  Trinity.  And  at  the 


TRIUMPHANT  GODLINESS  179 


same  time  all  the  lofty  apprehension  of  one 
dependable  will,  one  final  unity  of  life  as  the 
basis  of  the  life  of  the  world  remain  clearly 
and  completely  expressed  in  a  thought  of  God 
which  sees  all  this  ample  richness  of  con¬ 
sciousness  within  the  harmony  of  one  unified 
divine  life.  It  is  clear  that  if  we  are  to  find 
the  basis  of  the  social  passion  in  the  very 
nature  of  God  and  not  in  the  will  of  a  lonely 
Being  who  created  human  spirits  to  be  as 
utterly  unlike  him  as  possible,  we  must  have 
some  such  solution  as  the  conception  of  the 
Trinity  offers.  From  this  point  we  can  easily 
see  how  this  thought  of  God  has  perpetually 
haunted  the  minds  of  all  thinkers  whose  inves¬ 
tigation  of  ultimate  problems  as  they  are 
related  to  the  Christian  faith  has  moved  in 
the  largest  areas  and  has  included  the  sense 
of  the  strange  and  sometimes  seemingly  ulti¬ 
mate  antinomies  of  life  and  thought. 

We  now  turn  to  two  other  conceptions  of 
deity  not  unrelated  to  those  which  we  have 
just  been  considering  which  have  had  their 
own  curious  and  checkered  history  in  man’s 
adventurous  quest  for  the  knowledge  of  God. 
There  is  the  thought  of  the  Divine  as  vital 
energy.  There  is  the  thought  of  God’s  moral 
character.  On  the  one  hand  you  have  all 
those  aspects  of  religion  which  have  been  most 


180  SYNTHETIC  CHRISTIANITY 


impressed  by  tbe  productive  power  of  nature 
— tbe  passing  of  tbe  seasons,  tbe  planting  of 
seeds,  tbe  growth  of  all  living  things,  the 
golden  harvests,  and  tbe  strange  and  mysteri¬ 
ous  powers  lurking  in  tbe  reproductive  proc¬ 
esses  of  animals  and  of  man.  You  have  here 
a  vast  realm  of  amazingly  vital  potency,  and 
it  is  easy  to  understand  bow  men  were  im¬ 
pressed  by  it  and  in  all  sorts  of  fashions  came 
to  worship  tbe  power  which  it  expressed. 
But  along  these  lines  there  was  infinite  danger 
as  well  as  a  kindling  sense  of  living  forces. 
It  was  easy  to  put  upon  the  throne  those  pas¬ 
sionate  desires  which  man  early  began  to 
understand  must  be  mastered  and  steadied 
and  controlled  and  not  allowed  to  master  the 
whole  personality.  Fire  is  a  wonderfully  im¬ 
portant  and  useful  thing.  It  gives  heat  in 
winter.  It  gives  illumination  in  darkness  and 
it  comes  as  the  heat  of  the  sun  in  summer  to 
give  life  to  all  growing  things.  But  if  you 
should  decide  to  worship  fire  and  to  express 
that  worship  by  burning  down  a  beautiful 
house  or  a  noble  temple  every  time  you  came 
to  the  celebration  of  a  religious  festival,  the 
results  would  be  tragic  and  disintegrating  in¬ 
deed.  And  this  is  precisely  the  sort  of  thing 
which  happened  in  religious  prostitution  and 
in  many  a  dark  and  obscene  rite  of  that  wor- 


TRIUMPHANT  GODLINESS  181 


ship  whose  fundamental  inspiration  was  the 
thought  of  the  Divine  as  vital  energy.  In  all 
such  forms  of  worship,  a  man’s  religion  be¬ 
came  the  greatest  foe  of  that  wise  and  noble 
self-control  which  is  the  essential  of  progres¬ 
sive  life.  It  was  inevitable  that  men  to  whom 
the  moral  meaning  of  life  became  increasingly 
clear  should  lift  up  wistful  hands  for  a  divine 
ally  in  the  great  ethical  battles  of  life.  And 
the  full  and  perfect  expression  of  the  insight 
into  the  Divine  as  moral  character  is  found  in 
the  mighty  Hebrew  prophets  who  pronounced 
the  word  “righteousness”  in  such  fashion  that 
they  became  the  creators  of  an  ethical  civ¬ 
ilization  with  a  moral  passion  which  swept 
over  the  plains  of  human  life  like  wind  from 
the  hills.  To  a  modern  man  it  is  almost  start¬ 
ling  to  find  how  many  religions  have  been 
unethical  or  only  incompletely  ethical.  The 
lifting  of  religion,  clear  and  clean,  into  the 
ethical  realm  is  one  of  the  most  marvelous 
experiences  in  the  moral  history  of  man.  Now 
the  worshiper  finds  the  Deity  on  the  side  of 
his  own  noblest  insights,  and  he  finds  those 
insights  infinitely  enlarged  and  enriched.  He 
is  never  tempted  as  men  have  been  tempted 
in  so  many  religions  to  become  better  than  his 
God. 

Here,  again,  we  have  two  principles  which 


182  SYNTHETIC  CHRISTIANITY 


have  had  the  most  varied  expression.  And  it 
is  an  infinitely  complex  series  of  conceptions 
and  experiences  which  a  man  must  trace  out 
and  follow  if  he  is  to  gain  any  comprehensive 
understanding  of  the  battle  of  the  ethical  in¬ 
sights  for  a  place  in  religion.  He  must  survey 
that  utter  pessimism  which  turns  from  all  the 
hot  and  vivid  energies  of  life  in  final  repudia¬ 
tion,  as  if  a  man  should  decide  never  in  all 
his  life  to  have  anything  to  do  with  fire  be¬ 
cause  it  may  become  deadly  conflagration.  He 
must  read  all  the  strange  and  often  abnormal 
tales  of  the  varied  asceticisms  of  the  world. 
He  must  follow  the  periods  of  reaction  when 
the  life  which  was  denied  comes  back  with 
tremendous  and  tempestuous  power,  and  he 
must  see  the  reaction  itself  often  taking  forms 
which  burn  out  the  very  worth  of  the  human 
spirit  in  the  hot  fires  of  lawless  indulgence. 
As  he  goes  over  this  varied  and  tragic  tale 
he  comes  to  long  more  and  more  for  a  syn¬ 
thesis  of  the  thought  of  the  Divine  as  vital 
energy  and  the  thought  of  the  Divine  as  moral 
character  which  shall  bend  all  the  intense 
forces  of  life  to  its  own  high  self-control  and 
at  the  same  time  shall  keep  the  thought  of 
God  warm  and  vital.  There  is  the  desire  to 
escape  from  the  intense  heat  of  the  tropics  of 
unbridled  passion  and  the  cruel  cold  of  the 


TRIUMPHANT  GODLINESS  183 


arctic  circle  of  an  ethic  whose  terrible  “ought” 
has  no  place  for  the  glow  of  a  warm  and  eager 
desire,  from  a  God  whose  cold  and  distant 
austerities  would  freeze  the  life  of  the  world. 
It  is  at  this  point  that  a  man  is  ready  for 
an  inspection  of  the  Christian  religion  from 
a  new  angle.  And  the  results  are  wonderful 
and  inspiring  enough.  On  the  one  hand  Chris¬ 
tianity  takes  oyer  all  the  supreme  ethical  in¬ 
sights  of  the  Old  Testament  and  lifts  them  to 
new  places  of  power  and  beauty.  The  God 
whom  Christians  worship  is  indeed  a  God 
with  a  character  and  a  God  to  whom  moral 
interests  are  supreme.  But  you  soon  discover 
that  this  moral  intensity  is  not  the  cutting 
bitterness  of  freezing  cold.  It  is  the  burning 
intensity  of  tremendous  heat.  Morality  itself 
is  set  on  fire.  Morality  itself  becomes  a  con¬ 
suming  passion  in  the  life  of  God.  And  it  is 
this  fire  which  has  such  surgical  and  healing 
power  to  burn  out  evil  desire.  In  Christian¬ 
ity  evil  thoughts  are  not  frozen  by  a  blight¬ 
ing  cold.  They  are  burned  up  by  a  marvelous 
moral  fire.  And  evil  passion  is  met  and  mas¬ 
tered  by  a  mightier  good  passion.  Righteous¬ 
ness  becomes  the  most  glowing  and  blazing  of 
all  experiences  in  the  life  of  God  and  in  the 
life  which  he  creates  in  men.  And  this  con¬ 
suming  fire  of  virtue  is  the  steadying  and  the 


184  SYNTHETIC  CHRISTIANITY 


interpretation  of  every  human  impulse.  The 
love  of  Jesus  for  little  children  and  his  hearty 
regard  for  every  normal  human  experience 
and  for  every  wholesome  human  joy  is  an 
expression  of  a  certain  warm  and  eager  appre¬ 
ciation  of  every  bright  and  vivid  human  rela¬ 
tionship.  In  a  way  the  most  amazing  triumph 
of  Christianity  is  the  Christian  home  which 
takes  a  fire  which  might  easily  become  a  con¬ 
flagration  and  controls  and  enriches  and  even 
transforms  it  into  the  perpetual  hearth  fire 
of  all  the  gentle  sanities  and  goodness  of  the 
domestic  life.  So  it  comes  to  pass  that  in 
Christianity  self-control  is  a  positive  and  crea¬ 
tive  thing.  It  is  not  the  great  refusal.  It  is 
the  great  assertion.  The  truth  is  that  there 
are  only  two  ways  to  interpret  the  great  urges 
of  life.  You  may  interpret  the  higher  in  the 
terms  of  the  lower  and  so  drag  all  life  down. 
You  may  interpret  the  lower  in  the  terms  of 
the  higher  and  so  lift  all  life  up.  The  wor¬ 
ship  of  a  God  of  infinite  goodness  who  is  at 
the  same  time  the  source  of  all  the  glowing 
and  vital  energies  of  the  world  means  a  con¬ 
tact  with  those  great  and  searching  moral 
energies  which  shall  purge  the  life  of  evil 
and  enthrone  the  good.  A  man  is  never  more 
vividly  and  vitally  alive  than  when  he  refuses 
the  lower  because  he  has  learned  to  love  the 


TRIUMPHANT  GODLINESS  185 


higher.  It  is  only  when  he  tries  to  refuse  the 
lower  without  any  higher  to  put  in  its  place 
that  life  becomes  a  strange  and  abnormal  and 
ugly  thing  Jesus  put  this  with  memorable 
power  into  his  little  story  of  the  man  out  of 
whom  a  devil  was  cast  with  nothing  to  put  in 
its  place.  In  the  Christian  conception  the  God 
with  a  character  brings  infinite  richness  and 
fullness  to  the  life  of  his  children.  And  self- 
denial  itself  becomes  a  glad  and  glorious  thing 
at  last  because  the  thing  for  the  sake  of  which 
the  denial  is  made  is  so  much  ampler  and 
better  and  more  fruitful  than  anything  which 
is  lost.  Every  “Thou  shalt  not”  of  the  Chris¬ 
tian  religion  is  clearing  the  way  for  a  greater 
“Thou  shalt.”  When  we  view  historic  Chris¬ 
tianity  at  its  moments  of  fullest  consciousness 
of  its  own  genius  these  things  are  shiningly 
clear.  When  it  has  fallen  below  them  it  has 
been  through  an  incomplete  apprehension  of 
its  own  nature  and  character.  So  here,  again, 
in  the  most  glorious  fashion,  Christianity 
proves  the  living  synthesis  which  preserves 
the  good  and  transcends  the  limitations  and 
the  evils  of  two  opposing  views,  indeed  of  two 
opposing  forces  which  move  through  the  world 
and  through  human  life. 

Taking  another  step  we  find  another  con¬ 
trast  which  easily  connects  itself  with  the  one 


186  SYNTHETIC  CHRISTIANITY 


which  we  have  been  considering.  It  is  pos¬ 
sible  to  view  the  divine  as  matter.  It  is  pos¬ 
sible  to  view  the  divine  as  mind.  In  a  good 
deal  of  Greek  thought  the  distinction  between 
mind  and  matter  had  not  emerged.  But  it  is 
one  of  those  distinctions  inevitable  as  man’s 
reflection  upon  his  own  experience  becomes 
clearer;  and  once  the  distinction  has  emerged, 
it  is  equally  inevitable  that  mind  and  mat¬ 
ter  shall  do  battle  for  the  full  possession  of 
the  field.  The  world  of  things  in  the  thought 
of  the  every-day  man  is  so  insistently  and  per¬ 
petually  present  that  it  may  seem  to  occupy 
the  place  of  control  by  a  sort  of  divine  right. 
The  world  of  mind  is  so  evasive  and  elusive 
that  it  may  seem  little  able  to  maintain  itself 
in  the  fierce  struggle  with  things.  But  the 
little  soldier  we  call  the  mind,  like  another 
David,  has  slain  many  a  Goliath  of  matter  in 
the  long  struggles  of  the  passing  years.  The 
disconcerting  thing  is  just  that  in  this  realm 
battles  are  not  at  an  end  with  one  victory  or 
with  a  series  of  them.  Even  when  the  intel¬ 
lectual  victory  is  clearly  on  the  side  of  mind, 
the  practical  claims  of  the  material  are  felt, 
and  often  men  end  by  worshiping  with  their 
actions  what  they  have  denied  in  their 
thought.  In  some  form  or  other  every  man 
must  meet  the  fight.  As  we  look  carefully  into 


TRIUMPHANT  GODLINESS  187 


the  situation  it  seems  here  again  that  we  may 
well  try  to  find  a  harmonizing  word.  What¬ 
ever  the  ultimate  nature  of  matter,  it  is  un¬ 
doubtedly  true  that  material  values  are  an 
important  part  of  every  human  experience. 
And  the  more  we  think  about  it  the  more  we 
see  that  unless  the  material  is  mastered  and 
interpreted  by  something  which  is  beyond,  the 
material  life  goes  down  in  shipwreck  at  last. 
We  need  a  view  of  God  which  shall  put  mind 
upon  the  throne  and  which  shall  make  matter 
the  willing  and  happy  servant  of  mind:  or  if 
this  is  too  much  like  personifying  matter,  shall 
make  all  physical  experience  the  harmonious 
expression  of  spiritual  values.  When  we 
approach  the  Christian  religion  with  this 
thought  in  view,  we  find  at  once  that  assured 
mastery  of  the  mind  which  is  so  clearly  the 
goal  of  our  quest.  But  to  Jesus,  at  least,  the 
material  was  not  something  foreign  to  his 
power  and  use.  Every  material  thing  became 
the  vehicle  of  his  mental  insights,  of  his  moral 
purpose,  and  of  his  spiritual  apprehension. 
Indeed,  the  material  suddenly  takes  on  a  new 
and  sacramental  value  as  in  his  hands  it  be¬ 
comes  so  completely  the  instrument  of  the 
spiritual  vision  which  dominates  the  mind  of 
Jesus.  Baptism  and  the  Lord’s  Supper  are 
indeed  two  expressions  of  something  very  deep 


188  SYNTHETIC  CHRISTIANITY 


and  significant  in  the  Christian  faith,  namely, 
the  insight  that  at  last  all  the  physical  realm 
is  the  symbol  and  the  expression  of  spiritual 
values  when  dominated  by  a  mind  controlled 
by  these  values.  And  as  we  study  the  influence 
of  Christianity  upon  the  world  we  see  that 
to  just  the  degree  that  its  real  character  has 
impressed  itself  upon  human  life,  to  that 
degree  the  physical  has  been  caught  up  into 
mental  and  moral  and  spiritual  meaning. 
Here,  again,  Christianity  proves  most  notably 
a  synthetic  experience  in  the  life  of  man. 

Turning  now  to  another  approach  to  the 
thought  of  the  Divine,  we  are  confronted  by 
another  set  of  seemingly  opposing  conceptions. 
There  is  the  thought  of  a  Divine  as  infinite. 
There  is  the  thought  of  the  Divine  as  finite. 
On  the  one  hand  there  is  the  deep  and  abiding 
intuition  that  the  Deity  must  transcend  all 
that  is  mutable  and  passing  in  this  frag¬ 
mentary  world.  He  must  be  the  absolute  as 
over  against  the  relative.  He  must  be  the 
utterly  complete  as  over  against  the  frag¬ 
mentary.  The  Divine  Life  must  be  that  in¬ 
finite  perfection  which  stands  in  the  sharpest 
contrast  to  all  the  imperfections  of  this  pass¬ 
ing  world.  He  must  be  the  final  end  of  all 
our  thinking,  the  goal  of  all  our  aspiring,  and 
in  him  all  the  elements  of  existence  must  be 


TRIUMPHANT  GODLINESS  189 


lifted  to  their  highest  power.  As  the  ultimate 
reality  he  must  fill  all  the  realm  of  thought 
and  action  with  a  transcendent  splendor.  He 
is  infinity  itself  in  its  ultimate  meaning. 

As  we  view  the  history  of  the  whole  series 
of  thoughts  of  the  Divine  which  connect  them¬ 
selves  with  this  approach,  we  soon  come  to 
realize  that  the  practical  outcome  in  respect 
of  many  of  them  is  to  push  God  far  away  from 
human  life  and  all  the  tragic  aspects  of  human 
experience.  It  is  easy  to  think  of  the  Abso¬ 
lute  in  such  terms  that  he  loses  all  contact 
with  any  such  experience  as  is  the  pain  and 
passion,  the  glory  and  fear  of  human  life.  We 
come  to  think  of  God  so  loftily  that  we  put 
him  entirely  out  of  reach.  We  find  a  deep 
gulf  set  between  the  world  of  human  experi¬ 
ence  and  the  world  of  Divine  Perfection.  And 
it  becomes  increasingly  evident  that  it  is  a 
gulf  which  God  himself  finds  it  hard  to  cross. 
Theories  of  emanations  are  resorted  to  in 
order  to  get  a  God  who  can  venture  to  have 
contact  with  humanity  without  being  too 
much  defiled.  But  this  only  shows  how  hope¬ 
less  the  problem  has  become.  The  problem 
which  arises  from  the  tendency  to  isolate  God 
in  his  own  perfections  is  one  of  the  most  dif¬ 
ficult  and  one  of  the  most  acute  in  the  whole 
story  of  thought  about  religion. 


190  SYNTHETIC  CHRISTIANITY 


On  the  other  hand,  in  sharp  contrast  and 
sometimes  in  definite  reaction  from  this  specu¬ 
lative  view  of  God  which  loses  him  in  the 
subtle  mazes  of  its  own  dialectic,  there  is  the 
sense  of  God  as  finite,  as  the  One  who  is  a  part 
of  our  life  and  shares  its  limitations,  who 
struggles  with  us  through  the  difficulty  and 
tragedy  of  situations  which  bear  upon  him  as 
upon  us  with  almost  intolerable  strain.  This 
sort  of  interpretation  has  been  given  with 
memorable  felicity  and  power  by  Mr.  H.  G. 
Wells.  In  the  stress  and  strain  of  the  World 
War,  men  like  Mr.  Wells  felt  that  they  must 
have  a  Deity  who  shared  with  them  in  all  the 
terrible  struggle  with  human  passion  and  pain 
and  evil.  They  could  not  abide  the  thought 
of  a  remote  and  distant  Deity  lost  to  man  in 
the  lonely  splendors  of  his  own  infinite  per¬ 
fections.  They  wanted  a  God  who  could  be 
a  Brother  even  as  he  must  be  a  Leader.  And 
the  thought  of  a  finite  God  seemed  to  make 
the  Deity  human  and  near,  a  partner  in  all 
the  woeful  strain  of  life,  the  great  heroic 
Leader  in  all  the  battle  with  evil. 

One  has  no  disposition  to  deny  the  attrac¬ 
tive  features  of  such  a  thought  of  God.  You 
have  a  warm  and  hearty  human  nearness 
which  brings  its  own  wonderful  message  of 
comradely  fellowship.  But  as  time  goes  on, 


TRIUMPHANT  GODLINESS  191 


the  sense  of  what  is  lost  grows  more  impres¬ 
sive  than  the  sense  of  what  is  gained  through 
this  view  of  the  Divine  There  is  no  ultimate 
Master  who  is  powerful  enough  to  bend  all  the 
energies  of  the  universe  to  his  own  purpose 
of  goodness  and  truth.  The  throne  room  of 
the  world  is  vacant.  Man  has  a  friendly 
Leader,  but  the  universe  has  no  infinite  King. 
You  can  never  tell  what  may  happen  in 
such  a  universe.  You  have  no  final  basis 
for  moral  certainty  or  for  spiritual  security. 
The  God  you  worship  is  himself  a  lonely 
fighter  in  a  universe  which  may  decide  against 
him  at  last.  And  the  dreadful  sense  of  in¬ 
security  grows  with  the  passing  days.  Good¬ 
ness  has  no  clear  and  permanent  basis  in  the 
nature  of  things.  Truth  has  no  abiding  basis 
in  the  constitution  of  the  universe.  Even  the 
finite  God,  with  all  his  heroism  and  good  will, 
is  a  pathetic  figure  as  he  moves  about  in  brave 
contention  with  an  unfriendly  world.  A  God 
with  a  fine  character  but  with  no  secure  hold 
upon  power  can  never  satisfy  the  need  of  the 
spirit  of  man. 

We  stand  confronting  a  particularly  test¬ 
ing  dilemma.  On  the  one  hand  is  a  Deity  lost 
in  the  splendors  of  his  own  infinity.  On  the 
other  is  a  God  marvelously  near  and  attrac¬ 
tive  but  with  no  firm  security  in  the  ultimate 


192  SYNTHETIC  CHRISTIANITY 


reality  of  things.  Is  there  no  way  in  which 
the  two  views  may  be  united?  Is  there  no  way 
in  which  all  the  ultimate  powers  of  the  infinite 
God  may  be  harmonized  with  the  near  and 
human  attractiveness  of  the  finite  God?  In 
this  moment  of  bewildered  questioning  we 
turn  once  more  to  the  Christian  faith.  And 
we  find  ourselves  in  particular  inspecting  the 
Christian  view  of  the  incarnation.  The  flood 
of  light  is  instant  and  wonderfully  reassur¬ 
ing.  Here  is  the  very  meeting  of  the  Divine 
and  human  for  which  we  have  been  longing. 
And  it  worked  itself  out  in  the  winsome  splen¬ 
dor  of  gracious  and  loving  human  living  right 
at  the  heart  of  the  historic  process  of  man’s 
life.  Jesus  has  every  quality  which  would 
give  attractiveness  to  the  finite  God.  He  bends 
under  man’s  burden.  He  accepts  his  limita¬ 
tions.  He  makes  himself  one  with  humanity 
in  the  most  astoundingly  complete  and 
authentic  way.  And  in  it  all  he  maintains 
the  stainless  beauty  of  a  life  whose  perfect 
sympathy  is  in  constant  union  with  flawless 
deeds.  The  ideal  has  indeed  touched  the  real. 
The  infinite  has  come  into  contact  with  the 
finite.  At  that  word  we  pause.  For  we  do 
indeed  realize  that  there  is  an  aspect  of  the 
experience  of  Jesus  which  opens  toward  in¬ 
finity.  With  all  the  bright  and  attractive 


TRIUMPHANT  GODLINESS  193 


appeal  of  Ms  human  qualities  there  are  a  depth 
and  a  fathomless  quality  about  him  which 
perpetually  lead  the  mind  and  the  conscience 
and  the  heart  on  to  the  thought  of  the  infinite 
and  perfect  God.  His  view  of  God  as  Father 
makes  the  Absolute  himself  approachable  in 
moral  quality  even  as  he  is  transcendent  in 
nature  and  power.  In  fact,  the  more  we  study 
the  whole  impact  of  Christianity  upon  the 
world  the  more  we  see  that  it  has  a  tremen¬ 
dous  seizure  in  just  the  fact  that  men  have 
always  felt  when  they  accepted  its  sanctions 
that  at  one  moment  they  were  in  contact  with 
the  ultimate  reality  of  the  infinite  life  of  God 
and  at  the  same  time  with  the  most  winsome 
expression  in  time  of  the  meaning  of  eternity. 
The  ultimate  faith  of  the  Christian  is  just 
this:  that  no  fact  and  no  experience  in  any 
range  of  the  universe  will  be  able  to  contra¬ 
dict  the  belief  in  God  which  Jesus  brought 
to  men.  There  is  nothing  more  ultimate  than 
the  truth  which  Jesus  brought  to  the  world. 
It  may  be  seen  in  ampler  relationships,  it 
may  be  seen  in  fuller  apprehension,  but  the 
man  who  knows  God  as  the  Father  of  our 
Lord  and  Saviour  Jesus  Christ  has  come  to 
an  ultimate  matter  which  nothing  in  the  uni¬ 
verse  can  change  or  dislodge  from  its  place 
of  commanding  power  and  reality.  Whether 


194  SYNTHETIC  CHRISTIANITY 


we  study  the  incarnation  as  a  conception 
taught  by  the  church  or  as  a  belief  arising 
inevitably  from  the  experience  of  men  in  con¬ 
tact  with  the  personality  of  Jesus,  it  is  clear 
that  here  we  have  a  meeting  of  the  two  sets 
of  interests  which  view  God  on  the  one  hand 
as  infinite  and  on  the  other  as  finite.  The 
two  views  meet  in  a  higher  harmony  in  the 
thought  of  God  coming  into  human  life  in  the 
person  of  Jesus  Christ.  And  this  harmony 
becomes  a  personal  experience  of  constant  and 
kindling  inspiration  in  the  life  of  the  Chris¬ 
tian  man. 

The  tale  of  religion  in  the  world  makes  it 
clear  that  it  is  possible  to  think  of  the  Divine 
with  the  emphasis  upon  eternity  or  with  the 
emphasis  upon  time.  An  enormous  amount 
of  the  history  of  the  religious  experience  of  the 
past  has  been  filled  with  the  rapturous, 
mystical  consciousness  of  the  glory  of  the  per¬ 
fect  felicity  of  eternity.  “  Jerusalem,  the 
golden,  by  milk  and  honey  blessed/’  has 
sounded  a  note  which  has  rung  across  the  ages. 
That  great  day  when  the  incomplete  is  lost  in 
the  complete,  when  evil  is  finally  conquered 
by  good,  when  tears  and  sighing  and  death 
are  finally  conquered  and  perfect  joy  and  per¬ 
fect  peace  reign  forever,  has  been  the  central 
joy  of  religion  for  multitudes  of  men.  To 


TRIUMPHANT  GODLINESS  195 


them  God  has  stood  for  the  security  of  all 
this.  Religion  has  been  the  conquest  of  time 
by  eternity.  On  the  other  hand,  much  of  the 
most  characteristic  piety  of  our  own  period 
takes  the  form  of  a  belief  in  the  injection  of 
divine  ideals  into  the  world  here  and  now. 
God  is  the  God  of  the  present,  however  mys¬ 
terious  the  future  may  be.  God  is  the  master 
in  the  fight  for  cleanness  and  justice  and 
goodness  in  the  very  world  where  we  dwell. 
God  is  the  Lord  of  time.  He  is  the  master  of 
to-day.  The  more  we  think  of  it,  the  more 
we  discover  that  both  notes  must  be  sounded 
in  a  complete  religion.  The  echoing  glories 
of  an  eternal  hope  must  not  be  lost.  The 
mighty  imperatives  of  to-day  must  be  retained. 
God  is  the  same  yesterday,  to-day,  and  for¬ 
ever.  And  this  synthesis  is  triumphantly 
achieved  in  the  Christian  religion.  On  the 
one  hand  it  gives  us  those  triumphant  visions 
of  perfect  felicity  in  the  future  which  bring 
the  New  Testament  to  a  close  in  a  perfect  hal¬ 
lelujah  chorus  of  rejoicing.  On  the  other  hand 
it  sees  the  glory  of  religion  in  visiting  the 
fatherless  and  the  widow  and  in  keeping  our¬ 
selves  unspotted  from  the  world.  How  “call 
ye  me,  Lord,  Lord,  and  do  not  the  things 
which  I  say?”  asks  Jesus.  And  from  the  same 
lips  fall  the  great  words  about  the  many 


196  SYNTHETIC  CHRISTIANITY 


dwelling  places  in  the  Father’s  house.  To 
Jesus,  godliness  was  both  a  present  activity 
and  a  future  hope.  God  stands  in  the  Chris¬ 
tian  religion  as  the  Mighty  Master  of  To-day 
and  the  Lord  of  all  the  unfathomable  future. 
The  Father  of  Jesus  Christ  may  be  trusted 
with  all  the  infinite  meaning  of  the  unfold¬ 
ing  years.  And  to-day  he  must  be  obeyed 
with  an  inspired  mind  and  a  loving  heart.  So 
godliness  as  action  and  godliness  as  hope  meet 
in  perfect  harmony  in  the  Christian  faith. 

If  we  are  approaching  the  thought  of  wor¬ 
ship  with  a  profound  apprehension  of  the 
need  of  an  ultimate  stability,  we  are  likely 
to  think  of  the  Divine  in  terms  of  necessity. 
If  we  approach  the  thought  of  worship,  full  of 
the  sense  of  the  need  of  kindling  inspiration 
and  of  an  ample  life  of  creative  energy,  we 
are  apt  to  think  of  the  Divine  in  terms  of 
freedom.  And  the  two  soon  take  on  the 
qualities  of  belligerent  antagonism.  Our 
security  is  likely  to  become  a  hard  and  rigid 
thing,  cold  and  mechanical  with  an  inescap¬ 
able  hardness.  Our  freedom  is  likely  to  be¬ 
come  a  lawless  thing,  moving  with  uncon¬ 
trolled  license  about  the  world.  Our  stability 
becomes  too  stable.  Our  freedom  becomes  too 
free.  And  so  we  begin  to  look  about  for  a 
method  of  combining  necessity  and  freedom, 


TRIUMPHANT  GODLINESS  197 


of  uniting  stability  and  liberty.  The  Chris¬ 
tian  religion  speaks  to  us  in  no  uncertain 
voice  as  we  approach  its  sanctions,  full  of  the 
thought  of  this  tantalizing  problem.  It  offers 
us  a  Deity  as  free  as  the  perfection  of  spon¬ 
taneous  goodness  and  a  divine  life  as  stable 
as  a  nature  whose  structural  quality  is  the 
very  reality  which  comes  to  conscious  expres¬ 
sion  in  all  moral  distinctions.  It  gives  us  a 
universe  as  secure  as  the  character  of  God 
and  as  free  as  the  spontaneous  energies  of  the 
divine  life.  And  it  reveals  these  qualities 
of  stability  and  freedom  united  in  the  per¬ 
fect  union  of  the  life  of  Jesus  himself  in  the 
world.  Freedom  and  necessity  find  their  ulti¬ 
mate  harmony  in  the  life  of  God.  They  find 
an  astoundingly  harmonious  expression  in  the 
life  of  Jesus  in  the  world.  They  are  all  the 
while  meeting  in  the  lives  of  those  in  whom 
the  Christian  religion  does  its  most  charac¬ 
teristic  work  as  it  goes  on  with  its  transform¬ 
ing  activity  in  the  life  of  man. 

It  is  one  of  the  most  interesting  aspects 
of  the  mental  activity  of  men  that  the  moment 
an  insight  becomes  structural  in  their  thought 
of  life  they  put  that  insight  right  into  their 
thought  of  the  life  of  the  Deity.  If  they 
are  thinking  of  life  in  the  terms  of  power, 
God  is  the  all  powerful.  If  they  are  think- 


198  SYNTHETIC  CHRISTIANITY 


ing  of  life  in  the  terms  of  righteousness,  God 
is  the  all  righteous.  If  they  are  thinking  of 
life  in  the  terms  of  love,  God  is  the  all  loving. 
But  these  particular  insights  have  a  way  of 
getting  into  isolated  control  even  in  the  his¬ 
tory  of  Christian  thinking.  We  have  a  way 
of  thinking  of  God  in  such  a  fashion  that  one 
of  his  characteristics  captures  our  imagina¬ 
tion  until  we  have  no  room  for  any  other. 
With  some  Calvinists,  the  thought  of  the  sove¬ 
reignty  of  God  was  so  all-possessing  as  to  leave 
little  room  for  anything  else.  There  were 
Puritans  who  had  no  place  in  their  mind  for 
any  other  thought  than  that  of  the  justice  of 
God.  And  there  have  been  those  who  so  em¬ 
phasized  the  love  of  God  as  to  put  kindly 
emotion  in  command  of  his  life.  It  is  evident 
at  once  that  some  commanding  synthesis  of 
all  these  insights  is  needed.  And  it  is  to  be 
said  that  not  always  wisely  but  at  least  per¬ 
sistently  Christian  thinkers  have  been  haunted 
by  the  knowledge  of  this  necessity.  The  tale 
of  those  theories  of  the  meaning  of  the  death 
of  Christ  which  have  been  built  about  the 
thought  of  reconciling  the  compassion  and  the 
justice  of  God  have  at  least  had  this  laudable 
aim,  however  crude  has  been  the  method  by 
which  the  aim  has  at  times  been  wrought  into 
intellectual  form.  The  truth  is  that  if  religion 


TRIUMPHANT  GODLINESS  199 


is  to  be  commanding,  we  must  think  of  God 
in  the  terms  of  the  totality  of  his  perfect  vir¬ 
tues  as  they  blend  into  the  completeness  of 
his  divine  life.  And  if  all  this  is  to  be  com¬ 
manding  in  the  life  of  men,  there  is  a  great 
need  of  being  able  to  point  to  some  command¬ 
ing  deed  and  to  say,  “There  you  have  ex¬ 
pressed  in  action  just  what  God  is  in  the  full 
quality  of  the  moral  and  spiritual  meaning  of 
his  life.”  It  is  from  this  point  that  we  shall 
best  approach  the  consideration  of  the  cross 
of  Christ.  We  do  not  suggest  that  this 
method  will  exhaust  its  significance.  We  do 
suggest  that  it  will  reveal  a  wealth  of  wonder¬ 
ful  meanings.  It  is  not  a  battle  between  con¬ 
tending  attributes.  It  is  that  perfect  deed  of 
loving  giving  of  self  in  which  all  God’s 
thought  and  feeling  and  hope  and  desire  re¬ 
garding  the  children  of  men  find  perfect 
expression.  If  we  really  want  to  know  what 
the  Christian  God  is  like,  we  have  only  to 
point  to  the  cross  and  to  say,  “He  is  a  God 
who  is  capable  of  that.”  All  that  we  mean 
by  goodness,  all  that  we  mean  by  justice,  all 
that  we  mean  by  compassion,  all  that 
we  mean  by  love,  all  that  we  mean  by 
sovereignty  seeking  the  allegiance  of  willing 
hearts  and  not  the  forced  submission  of  un¬ 
willing  spirits,  all  that  we  have  been  able  to 


200  SYNTHETIC  CHRISTIANITY 


think  or  feel  or  dimly  apprehend  of  the  best 
man  can  believe  of  God  is  met  and  infinitely 
transcended  in  the  deed  npon  the  cross.  The 
moral  and  spiritual  synthesis  of  Christianity 
is  revealed  with  triumphant  power  upon  Gol¬ 
gotha. 

Now,  when  we  pause  to  consider  the  sig¬ 
nificance  of  the  elements  in  religion  and  in 
Christianity  which  we  have  been  considering, 
we  are  able  to  see  that  a  great  series  of  atti¬ 
tudes  toward  the  Divine  and  the  interpreta¬ 
tion  of  Deity  are  possible,  and,  indeed,  have 
emerged  upon  the  field  of  man’s  life.  And 
these  attitudes  can  be  classified  as  a  series  of 
positions  which  tend  to  express  themselves  in 
the  terms  of  mutual  hostility.  What  one 
asserts  another  is  immediately  inclined  to 
deny.  But  when  we  study  these  contending 
positions  more  closely  we  discover  that  they 
really  need  each  other.  They  are  mutually 
supplementary  rather  than  mutually  contra¬ 
dictory  when  seen  in  their  true  meaning. 
Taken  alone,  they  tend  to  move  off  into  ex¬ 
tremes  of  disastrous  folly  or  of  hard  rigidity. 
But  when  used  to  guide  and  check  each  other 
so  that  the  essential  meaning  of  each  comes  to 
its  own  place  in  the  harmony  of  a  higher  view, 
we  find  a  surprising  satisfaction.  And  when 
we  bring  these  opposing  attitudes  to  Chris- 


TRIUMPHANT  GODLINESS  201 


tianity  we  are  astonished  to  find  that  in  every 
case  it  offers  a  higher  unity  in  which  they 
find  such  a  harmony  that  each  is  saved 
from  extravagance.  Each  vital  insight  into 
the  nature  of  the  Divine  is  included  in 
the  Christian  faith.  We  see  this  wonderfully 
illustrated  in  the  past,  but  it  is  even  more 
striking  as  we  think  of  the  future.  The  most 
astonishing  thing  about  Christianity  from  this 
standpoint  is  the  matter  of  the  unrealized 
implications  of  its  own  positions.  We  can 
see  at  once  that  a  satisfying  religion  must  be 
a  religion  which  men  cannot  outgrow.  It 
must  move  in  advance  of  their  growing  in¬ 
sights.  It  must  be  able  perpetually  to  fill 
them  with  creative  expectancy.  And  this  is 
precisely  what  Christianity  does.  It  is  a  re¬ 
ligion  of  infinite  promise  as  well  as  a  religion 
of  notable  achievement.  The  synthetic  religion 
has  the  future  on  its  side.  The  principles  we 
have  been  discussing  also  offer  a  criterion  for 
the  judging  of  the  past.  Whenever  Christian¬ 
ity  has  been  most  deeply  conscious  of  its  own 
nature  it  has  pressed  forward  toward  that 
great  service  of  offering  a  higher  unity  in 
which  the  good  of  opposing  principles  found 
reconciliation.  Whenever  particular  Chris¬ 
tian  men  were  so  conscious  of  the  importance 
of  one  approach  that  they  forgot  the  meaning 


202  SYNTHETIC  CHRISTIANITY 


of  its  complementary  interpretation  they  were 
only  able  to  render  fragmentary  service.  As 
the  synthetic  religion  Christianity  enables  ns 
to  view  the  past  and  the  present  and  the  future 
in  a  great  unity  where  divergent  meanings 
find  harmony  and  opposing  principles  meet  in 
organic  reconciliation. 

In  our  discussion  of  the  Divine  and  its  rela¬ 
tion  to  the  experience  of  man,  we  have  con¬ 
tinually  spoken  of  life  in  the  terms  of  a  quest 
for  God  on  the  part  of  man.  There  is  no  doubt 
that  there  is  much  truth  in  this  conception 
of  the  nature  of  religion.  There  is  an  un¬ 
appeasable  hunger  in  the  heart  of  man  after 
some  sure  and  satisfying  contact  with  the 
Divine.  He  lifts  his  voice  in  a  far  call  which 
only  a  voice  from  the  infinite  can  answer.  In 
his  deepest  moments  and  in  his  greatest  hours 
he  is  engaged  in  the  great  quest.  He  wants 
many  things,  and  some  of  them  he  wants 
with  tremendous  intensity,  but  deepest  of  all 
and  most  of  all  he  wants  to  find  God.  And 
the  great  religions  of  the  world  are  full  of  the 
story  of  the  quest. 

But  as  we  look  more  deeply  into  the  story 
of  man’s  experience  in  the  realm  of  religion 
we  begin  to  suspect  that  this  is  not  all  of  the 
truth.  Again  and  again  we  come  upon  a  con¬ 
viction  that  an  approach  is  being  made  from 


TRIUMPHANT  GODLINESS  203 


the  other  side.  Men  digging  their  way  out 
after  a  fall  of  earth  closing  a  passage  in  a 
mine  have  heard  the  sound  of  the  picks  on  the 
other  side  of  the  vast  deposit  working  toward 
them.  They  were  not  working  alone.  They 
had  invisible  allies.  And  so  once  and  again 
man  has  been  conscious  of  an  approach  from 
the  darkness  and  the  mystery  of  that  sphere 
beyond  the  reach  of  his  mind.  He  has  heard 
the  sound  of  picks  on  the  other  side.  He  has 
known  that  a  party  of  rescue  was  working  its 
way  toward  him.  You  find  this  intuition  at 
the  most  golden  moments  of  all  the  great  re¬ 
ligions  of  the  world,  but  you  find  its  suprem- 
est  expression  in  the  Christian  religion  and  in 
that  noble  ethical  monotheism  from  whose 
loins  it  sprang.  The  Hebrew  prophets  do  not 
come  speaking  of  thoughts  which  they  have 
worked  out  concerning  God.  They  come  alive 
with  the  wonder  of  the  truth  which  he  has 
whispered  into  their  ears.  “Thus  saith  the 
Lord,”  is  their  characteristic  assertion.  Re¬ 
ligion  to  them  is  not  man  in  action  seeking 
God.  It  is  God  in  action  for  the  sake  of  man. 
And  all  this  comes  to  final  and  infinitely  won¬ 
derful  expression  in  the  life  reflected  by  the 
New  Testament  and  to  perfect  flower  in  the 
person  of  Jesus  Christ.  The  whole  secret  of 
the  Gospels  comes  at  last  to  this.  They  tell  the 


204  SYNTHETIC  CHRISTIANITY 


story  of  God’s  great  and  glorious  adventure 
for  the  saving  of  men.  In  Jesus  God  is  break¬ 
ing  away  all  the  barriers.  He  is  seeking  man 
at  infinite  price  of  peril  and  pain.  The  su¬ 
preme  story  of  adventure  in  all  the  world  is 
the  tale  of  the  coming  of  Jesus  Christ  to  meet 
men  upon  the  level  of  their  own  experience  of 
tragic  struggle  and  painful  battle.  The  New 
Testament  is  the  supreme  expression  of  the 
story  of  God’s  quest  after  man.  The  deepest 
hours  in  the  religious  life  of  the  Christian 
Church  have  been  full  of  the  wonder  of  this 
insight — the  sense  of  the  great  Ally.  The 
conviction  of  the  great,  seeking,  friendly  God 
ever  ready  to  go  to  great  lengths  for  the  rescue 
of  men  is  the  fundamental  insight  of  Chris¬ 
tian  experience.  In  our  own  modern  world 
this  consciousness  has  been  expressed  with 
memorable  felicity  and  abiding  power  in  that 
great  poem,  “The  Hound  of  Heaven,”  by 
Francis  Thompson.  When  we  see  the  matter 
in  all  its  relations  we  are  certain  enough  that 
the  religion  which  is  to  bring  permanent  in¬ 
spiration  to  men  must  embody  something 
more  than  man’s  quest  for  God,  great  and 
noble  as  this  is.  It  must  be  the  triumphant 
expression  of  God’s  quest  for  man.  And  here 
again  Christianity  occupies  a  place  of  lonely 
splendor  among  the  religions  of  the  world.  If 


TRIUMPHANT  GODLINESS  205 


religion  is  indeed  God’s  quest  for  man,  then 
Christianity  is  the  only  religion  which  can 
offer  complete  satisfaction  to  the  human 
spirit. 

We  have  seen  all  these  things,  looking  upon 
them  over  the  sweep  of  large  territories  of 
human  thought  and  experience.  Now  we  must 
remind  ourselves  that  a  religion  reaches  its 
central  power  of  kindling  vitality  as  a  master¬ 
ing  experience  in  the  life  of  an  individual 
man.  People  in  general  cannot  experience  the 
presence  of  a  God  in  general  and  so  achieve 
the  glory  of  a  transforming  faith.  It  is  the 
particular  man,  living  in  a  particular  place, 
bending  under  the  burden  of  particular  dif¬ 
ficulty,  fighting  a  battle  with  particular  and 
fascinating  evils,  which  come  up  against  his 
life  with  a  strange  allurement  and  yet  beset 
by  mighty  ideals  which  refuse  to  lower  their 
flag — it  is  this  man  who  must  meet  religion 
right  in  the  midst  of  his  passion  and  pain  and 
hope  and  fear,  and  so  meeting  it  must  come  to 
a  personal  experience  of  its  creative  power.  It 
is  precisely  at  this  point  that  Christianity  has 
expressed  its  potency  with  almost  startling 
strength.  Men  of  every  nation  and  of  every  age 
since  the  coming  of  Christ  have  stood  before 
the  world  the  actual  expression  of  a  mighty 
and  transforming  ethical  and  spiritual  force 


206  SYNTHETIC  CHRISTIANITY 


at  work  among  the  children  of  men.  If  Chris¬ 
tianity  has  ever  brought  complete  renewal  to 
the  life  of  one  man  anywhere,  there  is  a  new 
hope  for  all  mankind,  for  what  has  been  done 
once  may  be  done  again.  As  a  matter  of  fact, 
none  of  us  are  so  poor  that  we  do  not  know 
lives  shining  with  the  matchless  splendor  of 
the  glory  of  Christ.  And  this  personal  appro¬ 
priation  of  the  religion  which  has  gone 
through  the  ages,  leaving  a  bright  trail  of 
moral  and  spiritual  transformation  behind  it, 
is  the  central  ethical  act  of  a  man’s  life.  From 
this  act  all  sorts  of  mighty  forces  are  released 
in  the  life  of  the  individual,  and  from  it  all 
sorts  of  new  potencies  move  out  upon  the 
world. 

But  what  begins  as  an  individual  experience 
does  indeed  have  vast  social  relationships. 
Christianity  creates  men  of  a  new  quality  of 
good  will  in  the  world.  Then  it  becomes  the 
experience  of  the  community  of  good  will,  and 
so  it  becomes  a  vast  social  organism.  Every 
Christian  is  able  to  be  and  do  more  because 
of  that  which  other  Christians  are  being  and 
doing.  The  mighty  social  pressures  are  cap¬ 
tured  and  utilized  by  the  Christian  faith. 
And  now  upon  the  basis  of  individual  char¬ 
acter  and  individual  responsibility  rises  a  vast 
edifice  of  social  attainment,  and  the  facing  of 


TRIUMPHANT  GODLINESS  207 


the  social  requirements  of  the  Christian  faith, 
for  Christianity  is  the  making  of  a  new  society 
as  well  as  a  new  man.  Indeed,  it  is  only  as 
part  of  the  new  society  that  a  man  can  ex¬ 
perience  to  the  full  the  meaning  of  the  Chris¬ 
tian  religion. 

In  all  this  Christianity  becomes  an  infinitely 
more  intimate  thing  than  noble  thought.  It 
becomes  the  very  inmost  experience  of  the 
soul.  It  becomes  the  most  creative  energy 
released  in  the  human  spirit.  And  so  godli¬ 
ness  becomes  the  triumphant  consciousness  of 
the  presence  and  transforming  potency  of  the 
living  God,  the  deep  and  abiding  fellowship 
of  the  living  Christ.  And  as  it  triumphantly 
possesses  the  sources  of  thought  and  feeling 
and  action  in  the  individual  and  in  the  group, 
it  becomes  more  than  an  ideal,  it  reaches  that 
place  of  power  where  it  is  indeed  a  new  world 
entering  into  possession  of  the  life  of  man. 

In  discussing  such  a  theme  as  this  in  a  brief 
series  of  lectures  one’s  utmost  hope  is  to  se¬ 
cure  the  release  of  seminal  thought.  One  does 
not  dare  to  aspire  to  anything  like  complete¬ 
ness  of  analysis  or  fullness  of  treatment.  Life 
itself,  indeed,  is  required  for  the  working  out 
of  such  a  view  of  the  meaning  of  the  Christian 
religion  as  that  which  has  engaged  our  atten¬ 
tion.  If  we  have  seen  a  preliminary  view  of 


208  SYNTHETIC  CHRISTIANITY 


Christianity  as  the  ultimate  synthesis  in  ex¬ 
perience  of  truth  and  goodness  and  beauty 
and  brotherhood  and  godliness,  the  purpose  of 
our  hours  together  has  been  attained.  Is  there 
lying  in  the  corner  of  our  mind  one  baffling 
and  insistent  question,  a  question  which  re¬ 
fuses  to  be  put  down?  And  is  this  the  ques¬ 
tion?  “After  all,  how  may  we  be  sure?”  If 
there  is  such  a  question,  this  is  the  answer. 
Certainty  is  found  not  in  a  process  of  dialectic 
but  in  the  laboratory  of  life.  Let  us  venture 
forth  in  the  activities  of  the  experiment  sta¬ 
tion,  using  the  positions  we  have  set  forth  as 
working  hypotheses.  And  in  life  itself  we 
shall  find  certainty.  If  we  will  to  do,  we  shall 
know.  We  shall  know  the  truth  and  the  truth 
shall  make  us  free.  And  there  is  no  argument 
for  freedom  which  equals  the  fact  of  being 
free.  The  experience  of  the  synthesis  of  truth 
and  goodness  and  beauty  and  brotherhood  and 
godliness  in  the  Christian  religion  is  its  own 
authentication,  its  own  defense.  If  the  final 
solution  of  these  problems  were  in  the  intel¬ 
lectual  realm,  only  intellectual  giants  could 
reach  it.  As  the  final  test  is  in  the  field  of 
experience,  it  can  be  made  by  all  of  us.  That 
is  the  real  meaning  of  life,  and  the  men  and 
women  of  honest  heart  and  true  purpose  need 
have  no  fears  as  they  make  the  test. 


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